International travel has increased exponentially over the past 10 years, as more and more people go abroad for tourism, work or study. The Covid-19 pandemic paused these trends, but only temporarily. According to UN World Tourism Organization figures, international tourist arrivals represented 80% of pre-pandemic levels in Q1 2023 and are forecast to reach 95% by year-end. As we explained in a recent article, this increase in international travel is putting ever more pressure on government visa departments.  

They have been able to manage this pressure to some extent, by outsourcing the administrative aspects of the visa application process to external providers, allowing them to focus solely on decision-making. However, there remains a strong – and growing – imbalance between the number of applications that can be handled by government visa departments and the demand from visa customers wishing to travel. Visa outsourcing companies have to limit the number of appointments available at their Schengen visa centres to match government visa department capacity, and this creates a shortage. 

The role of intermediaries in the visa application process 

As always when there is a disconnect between supply and demand, some seek to take advantage of the situation and offer to reserve appointments on behalf of visa applicants. In some cultures, it is actually very common to hire someone to deal with administrative procedures. It can also be seen as a legitimate process, as regularly checking an outsourcer’s website to find an appointment can be time-consuming and frustrating.  

However, the fees applied by intermediaries for visa appointment booking have increased significantly in recent years and their activities are making it ever more difficult for individual visa customers to book their own appointments online. Local authorities are limited in how they can respond to these intermediaries, as they operate in a legal ‘no-man’s land’. While selling fake documents to support a visa application is illegal, selling visa appointments is not explicitly prohibited by the law.  

Governments across the Schengen Area clearly understand the risks associated with these activities and the potential impact on their reputation if an opaque group of intermediaries effectively take over control of their online appointment booking system. Visa outsourcing companies are also on the front line, facing daily suspicions of corruption or collusion. Common interest between government visa departments and outsourcers is therefore increasingly leading to coordinated actions to limit the activity of the intermediaries and protect individual visa applicants.  

How to counter fraudulent activity 

At TLScontact, we are focusing on three key areas:  

We first aim to make sure that the person booking an appointment online is the final customer who will come to our visa application centre. That requires strong cyber controls to differentiate robots from humans, to eliminate fraudulent scripts and keep intermediaries at bay. We also make sure that once booked, an appointment cannot simply be handed over to another person: our software doesn’t allow any changes to personal data after booking.

However, there is a balance to find between security, ease of access for customers and respect for their privacy. TLScontact has invested heavily, both financially and in terms of human resources, to address that ongoing challenge. 

Secondly, we aim to optimise our existing resources. Online appointment release is managed closely with government visa departments to offer maximum opportunity to individual applicants. According to the country or the situation, we may release a steady flow of appointments on random dates and times, or instead decide to input thousands of appointments instantaneously to overwhelm the intermediaries’ processing capabilities. At the other end of the process, we have also managed to significantly reduce the number of ‘no-shows’, where an appointment is booked but the person doesn’t attend at their scheduled time. We have done this by asking for upfront online payment (Advanced Fee Payment) to confirm an appointment, and by contacting applicants before their appointments with an email reminder or a phone call. These measures allow us to maximise appointment availability, by ensuring that slots are not blocked unnecessarily.  

Finally, we implement strong security controls at our centres. In order to look more appealing and attract new customers, intermediaries often falsely claim to have access to insiders within the visa application centre or the consulate itself, allowing them advance access to appointments. In reality, only a very limited number of senior TLScontact staff have the necessary authorisations to modify the appointment table and each action is recorded automatically. Furthermore, the government visa department carefully tracks all appointments allocated each day.  

An ongoing ‘arms race’ to counter appointment fraud 

The intermediaries operating around some of our centres regularly introduce new mechanisms to book appointments. Our teams are therefore engaged in an ongoing ‘arms race’ to develop new measures to block them. Such measures can include One Time Password solutions to secure new accounts created on our system, or the use of facial recognition to confirm appointment bookings. These first need to be agreed  with our government clients and must strike the right balance between security and customer experience.  

TLScontact has always put in place comprehensive procedures and strong controls to stop the risk of internal fraud. Nonetheless, the best protection is incorruptible staff and that is why our strong corporate culture and human resource policies are also key in helping us to mitigate the risks. 

Our objective is to ensure that legitimate visa customers can book their appointments on our website through a simple and transparent process, and then focus on preparing their application and forthcoming trip.  

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What is Cyber Essentials Plus?

The Cyber Essentials Plus certification is a UK government-backed accreditation that is internationally recognised. It validates our adherence to the best cyber security practices.

Although it is a UK-based certification, our Cyber Security Team are working to implement all its requirements globally across all our corporate offices and centres, for all our clients. That will guarantee proactive security and an all-round safe environment for our government clients and visa applicants as we handle their sensitive data.

Five cyber security pillars

The certification is based on five key pillars:

1. Firewall configuration: keeping firewalls strong and secure.
2. Secure configuration: implementing security measures when building and installing computers and network devices.
3. User access control: regulating who or what can view or use resources in our computing environment.
4. Patch management: applying updates to software, drivers, and firmware to protect against vulnerabilities.
5. Malware protection: adding an extra layer of security to computers to protect against cyberattacks.

Third-party accreditation for TLScontact cyber security measures

The Cyber Essentials Plus certification is divided into two phases:

1. “Cyber Essentials” certification: a questionnaire to self-assess the cyber security measures in place, a mandatory step before moving on to the next stage. We were certified on 12 May 2023, and we were able to pursue the “Plus”.
2. “Plus” certification: a third-party accredited auditor examined our adherence to these five pillars. We became fully certified on 2 July 2023.

“The process of getting fully certified was quick, as it took us less than two months. That is a testament to the measures that were already in place at TLScontact regarding cyber security. There is no need to get ready when you stay ready,” says Ryan Hiney-Brasil, Cyber Security Manager.

In a technology-driven world, cyber security is more important now than ever. It is the pillar that companies rely on to secure their systems, and at TLScontact strong cyber security controls are even more essential in view of the sensitive personal data that we manage on behalf of our government clients and visa customers. We realise that even a single successful cyberattack can cause irreparable damage, and we pledge to keep all our stakeholders protected from online threats. This new certification is a further demonstration of the strength of that pledge.

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In June 2023, over 360,000 employees from our parent company Teleperformance and its subsidiaries were invited to take part in this year’s Great Place To Work® survey. Participation from TLScontact employees was particularly strong, with a response rate of 93%, up from 84% in 2022.

TLScontact achieved Great Place To Work® certification in 47 countries, out of a total of 49 eligible locations. The following countries were Great Place To Work® certified this year:  

Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia, Cameroon, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Lithuania, Madagascar, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, United Kingdom, Vietnam. 

This is the third year in a row that we have run the Great Place To Work® survey, as part of a group-wide initiative organised by Teleperformance. These results represent a significant improvement on our 2021 and 2022 results, when we achieved Great Place To Work® certification in 22 and 34 countries respectively.  

Commenting on the certifications, Simon Yoxon-Grant, CEO said:  

“These results are a further illustration of the positive, inclusive culture that we have created at TLScontact. As an organisation, we are committed to creating a safe environment for all our employees, where they feel valued and supported, allowing us all to succeed, both individually and as a group. I am proud of what we are building together and thank our teams around the world for this vote of confidence. I also want to congratulate them for their commitment to our company and to the government clients and visa customers we serve.” 

Great Place to Work® is the global authority on workplace culture and employee experience. Its Trust Index Survey asks people to rate their employer in five key areas:  credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie.  

To learn more, visit the Great Place To Work® website.  

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The Franceville visa application centre is situated at the Coeur de Samba Belle Vue Hotel. It has already opened its door to applicants, following the renewal of the visa outsourcing contract, signed by TLScontact with the French consulate in Gabon on 19 May 2023. Operations continue normally in Libreville and Port Gentil.

As the French consulate in Gabon represents 12 Schengen countries, our local teams will be processing Schengen visa applications for France, but also for the other Schengen countries represented by the consulate, managing the administrative aspects of the application process on behalf of the local French diplomatic mission.

The new Franceville centre will only operate one day per month for now, adding more working days during the summer to keep up with the rising demand in the high season.

TLScontact has been operating in Gabon since 2016, first in Libreville, then in Port Gentil, at a centre inaugurated in 2019. “The opening of this new centre in Franceville allows us to be closer to customers in one of the biggest cities in Gabon, which saves them a long commute across the country to submit their application,” says Mohammed Mtir, TLScontact Centre Manager.

The opening of this new centre further expands TLScontact’s presence in Africa, allowing us to increase our proximity to visa applicants and provide our government clients with more administrative assistance across the globe.

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We sat down with three of our Zone and Centre Managers to find out first-hand what their secret to quality customer experience is. 

How would you define “quality customer experience” for a visa outsourcer? 

Visa applications can be a stressful experience, especially if it’s an applicant’s first time. We need to do our best to simplify the process, remove complexities, and explain the distinction between the outsourcer and the decision-maker if needed. Consistency is also key: everyone should have a good experience at our centre. 

We make sure that we never treat people as a number. We are often part of an important milestone in their lives, whether happy, like studying abroad or joining a family member, or sad, like attending the funeral of a loved one. That’s why it’s important that our interactions are based on empathy and respect. 

How do Added-Value Services (AVS) elevate the customer experience? 

We’re not in the business of selling people services they don’t need. What we do is identify the cases where a service would be helpful and suggest it. If we know a customer is travelling from a remote area in Ireland, they’ve probably taken a day off from work or school and spent money on transportation to come to us. That’s why we will suggest the courier service for their passport return and save them the trip back to our centre if they prefer. 

How do you make the customer feel more comfortable throughout the process? 

We have a very supportive team of agents who have had proper training on communication, hospitality, and process monitoring, and who feel empowered to provide the best service they can. 

We also try as much as possible to take into consideration the specificities of our city and people. TLScontact is present in over 90 countries, and not all standards can be applied to all cultures and communities. For example, during the biometric data collection, female applicants from Indonesia’s Muslim majority who do not wish to remove their veil in front of our male colleagues can be accompanied and processed by a female employee in a private booth. 

What role does communication play, especially when the customer is not at the centre? 

The amount of information available can be overwhelming. Our responsibility is to provide correct and quick information. Like our colleagues across the globe, we use our local website and the signage in the centre to relay relevant and up-to-date information. We also complement this with more regular communication on our local social media page about centre closures, service updates, and anything that the applicants might need to know before, during, or after their process. As you can imagine, the page proved particularly helpful during Covid-19. 

When we think of customer experience, we generally think of the agents in the centre. But another piece of the customer experience puzzle is the call centre. How does it fit in the bigger picture? 

We make sure our call centres are two-way. They’re not only a channel for customers to contact us for inquiries or complaints. We also call them to follow up on their questions and complaints, provide the right information, listen to them, and figure out how we can help them. When you take the initiative and call the customer, you’ve already solved 80% of the problem, because they want empathy and understanding beyond anything else, and it’s our way of saying, “we see you, we hear you, we’re here for you.”  

Do you receive customer feedback and how do you utilise it?

It’s important to receive customer feedback continuously, so we can work on improving the process as we go. We rely heavily on our Enterprise Feedback Management platform to get data based on the surveys that the customers complete at different steps in the visa journey and see what they really need from us. We can’t influence the final visa decision and we can’t influence the timeline of the decision, but what we can do is make sure that our customers have the best experience possible from the first moment they start interacting with us. 

For TLScontact, the customer experience begins online, before the visa applicant arrives at the centre, and ends when the applicant receives their passport back. Read our other Insights articles to learn more about the measures we are taking to improve both the online journey and the in-centre experience for our visa customers. 

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Despite the efforts of centralised government visa departments and local consulates to manage the increase in the number of visa applications in the last decade, they have struggled to keep up with the volumes while maintaining good service quality and the security of their premises. To remedy this, many have chosen to outsource the administrative load of visa processes, allowing them to focus on their sovereign decision-making role.

How does visa outsourcing work?

The decision-making bodies, whether local consulates or centralised teams, retain the exclusive tasks of application examination, interviewing and final decision-making. The service provider plays no role in granting (or not) the visa to the applicant, instead handling: 

• Information and appointment booking: through dedicated local websites.
• Applicant appointments: at centres designed to welcome a large number of applicants.
• Document collection and checks: the provider’s agents make sure that the applicant has submitted all the documents they wish to annex to their application, and if requested, assist the applicant to do so.
• Biometric data collection: photo capture, fingerprint scanning, and signature if applicable.
• Passport return: once an answer has been given by the decision-making body, the provider returns the passport to the applicant, onsite or through a secure courier service.

What are the advantages of visa and consular service outsourcing?

1. Higher volume of applications processed

While governments are restricted by public budgets, an external provider can make a larger number of staff available, proportional to the volume of applications received per location. Therefore, each decision-making team can receive a larger volume of applications, and their team can concentrate on the examination of the files solely and properly, increasing efficiency. In addition, outsourcers can provide additional flexibility in staffing, increasing staff numbers in hub centres during seasonal peaks or at times of crisis.

2. Increased service quality

Visa outsourcing has significantly enhanced customer experience by reducing wait lines, improving service level standards and providing comfortable premises adapted to welcoming hundreds of applicants at once. Service providers can offer additional services to enhance the overall experience, such as a premium lounge, appointments outside standard working hours, and mobile appointments at a location of the customer’s choice. Moreover, outsourced agents follow a streamlined process, allowing for reduced processing times per file, and application files with reduced margins of error. The optimised files enable decision-makers to focus on their core decision-making role, reducing the time required to review each application.

3. Expanded geographic presence

Governments are restricted to their consular premises when providing visa and consular services. An outsourcer, on the other hand, can open multiple locations to be geographically closer to regions with the highest number of applicants. For example, in addition to our visa application centre in Beijing, customers in China can head to 14 other TLScontact centres across the country to submit their applications to 4 different governments.

4. Increased security

Long wait lines outside consulates can pose a security threat, especially when hundreds of applicants line up around the premises without a full security check. Outsourcing partners can help manage crowds by moving them to a more appropriate location that is adapted to safely receiving high volumes of visitors. The work of the outsourcing partner is strictly regulated according to the government client’s rules, local data privacy laws, and international standards in terms of information security, data privacy and fraud prevention.

Outsourcing helps government and consular teams focus on their core decision-making role, reduce costs, and bring increased overall efficiency and value to their work. By delegating non-core tasks, governments allow for an improved process and experience for travellers and citizens across the globe.

[1] UN World Tourism Organization, Tourism Dashboard, International tourist arrivals

The post Improving Visa Processes: How Outsourcing Benefits Governments and Applicants appeared first on TLScontact.

Our local teams will be processing Schengen visa applications for France, managing the administrative aspects of the application process on behalf of the local French diplomatic mission.

“The opening ceremony was held in the presence of the French General Consul of Mosul, Jean-Christophe Augé, the French Consul of Baghdad, Samuel Bouchard, the Governor of Nineveh, Najm al-Jubouri, as well as other prominent figures from Iraq and local and international journalists, showcasing the significance of the inauguration of such a centre in Mosul,” says Bilal Diaa, Middle East Zone Manager at TLScontact.

“As French General Consul, I am very happy to inaugurate this centre in Mosul with the French General Consul of Baghdad, our partner TLScontact, and the governor of Nineveh. France is the first Schengen country to open a visa application centre in Mosul. It’s also the only EU country to have named a general consul in Mosul. The opening of the centre will contribute to strengthening the relations between France and the Nineveh Governorate,” declared French General Consul of Mosul, Jean-Christophe Augé.

The VAC will open its doors for applicants two days per month as a first step and will increase its working days proportionally to demand. Applications will be processed by the consular services of the French Embassy in Baghdad.

“The preparations and staffing of the centre went very smoothly, reflecting the will of the people of Mosul to rebuild and strengthen their city after its liberation from the Islamic State terrorist group,” says Dheyazan Talat Shafeeq, Iraq Country Manager at TLScontact.

This VAC isn’t the first TLScontact centre in Iraq: we have been running visa outsourcing services in the country since 2014. Today, visa applicants can head to our centres in Baghdad, Basra, or Erbil depending on whether they are applying for a visa to France, the UK, Belgium, or Hungary.

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Picture a reality where the process of applying for a travel visa is as harmonious as a symphony, where every touchpoint and every interaction are orchestrated to deliver a seamless experience for all parties involved. That world is possible with our high-touch Total Experience (TX) approach.

Gartner, the technology research and consulting firm, defines the TX approach as incorporating customer experience, employee experience, user experience and multiexperience considerations for a product or service. At TLScontact, we take this one step further. As a visa and consular services outsourcer, we need to consider the experience of our own employees, who interact every day with visa applicants, and of the government caseworkers who make decisions on the applications that we collect on their behalf.

As the CIO of TLScontact, I have seen first-hand the importance of understanding the experience of customers (visa applicants), government caseworkers, and TLScontact agents (our employees) when it comes to delivering value through digital services. The visa application process is comprised of a series of interactions among these different stakeholders. Ultimately, the customer’s experience depends on how smooth and easy both the agent’s and the government decision maker’s parts of the journey are: how easily they can process the application, provide the necessary support to the applicant, make a visa decision, and issue a visa if approved.

This requires a design approach that not only considers the usability and aesthetics of the different user interfaces but also the fact that customers access our services through their preferred channels, such as a website, mobile app, kiosk, or in-person at one of the 150 visa application centres we operate around the world. With our TX philosophy, our objective is to make our agent’s experience efficient and effective, and the government caseworker’s experience optimised for their specific needs, so that the applicant’s experience is simple, smooth, and effortless. This is what makes the TX approach more effective and powerful than the CX approach alone.

A holistic, human-centred design approach

User research and the application of human-centred design and business-aware design are integral components of our high-touch TX approach. We have applied them to all the technology products that we have developed for our three key user groups.  

• Human-centred design is an approach we use to design products, services, or systems with a deep understanding of the people who will use them. It puts the end-user at the centre of the design process, taking into account their needs, behaviours, and preferences. Human-centred design involves research and analysis to identify user needs, brainstorming and prototyping to develop and test solutions, and iterating based on user feedback.
• Business-aware design is a product and service design approach that puts the end-user needs in the perspective of the goals, requirements, and constraints of our government clients and our corporate and business operations teams. Additionally, business-aware design considers the current and future needs of our clients and our organisation, ensuring that our solutions are sustainable and adaptable to changing circumstances.

In summary, human-centred design and business-aware design are complementary design approaches that prioritise understanding end-users’ needs and behaviour while balancing business objectives. They allow us to create solutions that meet the evolving needs of governments, citizens, and our own employees, taking into account the overlapping requirements and specific pain points of these three groups to create a more compelling experience for all.

Trust, the final ingredient for a note-perfect TX symphony

The final essential component of a successful TX approach is trust. Trust is established through transparency, delivering on our promises and handling difficult questions effectively.

• Transparency: We provide full oversight to our government clients of our daily operations and we are transparent with our visa customers as to why we collect their data and how it will be used.
• Consistent delivery: We deliver on our commitments to government clients and visa customers through the application of group-wide standards and processes, regular performance monitoring and the strong buy-in of our employees.
• Addressing problems when they arise: Finally, we don’t shy away from difficult questions or conversations. We maintain a constructive dialogue with our government clients, seek regular feedback on the quality of our services and our customer satisfaction team is eager to help each and every visa applicant, addressing their concerns via a range of different channels. Every journey counts, every interaction matters.

We are committed to creating a beautiful symphony of total experience by building this trust and harmonising the user journeys of our three key stakeholder groups. Our aim is to provide a seamless and effortless experience for everyone interacting with our brand, and deliver on our promise to make international travel easy and safe for both governments and citizens.

Article written by
Alexander ZVERINTSEV, Chief Information Officer

The post The Symphony of Total Experience: harmonising the melodies of visa and consular services appeared first on TLScontact.

Visa processing is increasingly moving in the same direction as other formerly paper-intensive industries, such as banking. As the cost of paper processing mounts, digital solutions are becoming increasingly affordable while providing a level of security compatible with the highly sensitive nature of visas. No wonder, then, that a growing number of our government clients have already made the switch and created a nearly complete digital journey for visa processing.  

Changing customer habits 

Global citizens of all ages are becoming more and more familiar with digital experiences. Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous and older generations are becoming more at ease with everything digital. A majority of travellers are unlikely to have trouble completing an online visa application form and will often prefer online submission to filling out a document by hand. 

The benefits of moving to paperless processes will also be felt by the administrations that decide to take this route. The archiving of paper applications, mandatory for a 12-month period after any Schengen visa application, for example, requires consulates to put in place large storage areas and allocate resources to managing and, ultimately, destroying these archives. 

The efficiencies of a paperless process

Figures from the banking sector highlight these hidden costs and of the savings that can be generated through document digitisation. A study published by the international consultancy Deloitte, shows that streamlining processes and adding technology to eliminate paper entirely can reduce operating costs by as much as 25%, with a reduction of between 60% and 70% of the associated costs of records management. 

These figures are particularly interesting because of the parallels between the banking and visa sectors, both of which make extensive use of forms and archives and handle very sensitive information. They also give us a sense of the efficiencies that are possible when an organisation moves a paper-based process online. For countries where the interior ministry is in charge of visa decision-making, this can now be centralised, and this is the route that several of our government clients have already taken. For those countries where visa applications are processed at the consulate level, digitisation means that it is possible to support a consular team that might be under-staffed or help them to manage a peak in demand during the high season, thanks to reinforcements provided from a distance, at the ministry level.  

Safer technology

Moving to a paperless process used to be easier said than done, particularly for security reasons. Technological advances have removed that barrier, making it possible to secure the digitisation process, as well as the storage and transfer of digital files. TLScontact has developed a solution specifically designed to support applications for citizen services such as visas. TLSdocuments is a secure document digitisation and management system which has helped a number of our government clients to transform their visa application process away from a paper-based system. TLSdocuments can be used for on-site scanning of customer passports and supporting documents. It also allows customer self-service, giving visa applicants the option to scan and upload their documents themselves before their visa appointment, using a desktop or mobile device. Documents are signed at source and transferred to government servers using end-to-end encryption, before being deleted from our systems in accordance with strict purge rules.  

The forthcoming digital revolution

The visa application process will no doubt become increasingly digitalised, making it more efficient, less costly and better for the overall customer experience. Digitalisation also brings with it clear environmental benefits. To go back to the example of TLSdocuments, we estimate that our solution currently enables 23 million pages of documentation to be scanned instead of printed each year, and generates annual savings of 1,520 tons of CO₂.

Ultimately, we could see a complete transformation of the visa application process, going beyond just document digitisation to encompass remote biometric enrolment. However, the end result will probably be some form of coexistence of the digital and the physical throughout the entire process, with different mixes depending on the local context and the client country’s own preferences. This is what at TLScontact we call ‘smart digitalisation’, striking the right balance between cost reduction, ease of use and security.  

Article written by Céline Durnez, Head of Product Portfolio Management
& Pedro Alfama, Product Manager 

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Lean Management and the Six Sigma methodology have been around for several decades. Lean started at Toyota in Japan, a few years after WWII. It is a continuous improvement methodology that aims to identify and eliminate waste in business processes. Six Sigma, on the other hand, was introduced at Motorola in the US in the middle of the ’80s. Its data-driven approach focuses on eliminating defects and reducing variability in processes. Both approaches are complementary: Lean Management focuses on the continuous improvement of processes, while Six Sigma uses statistical analysis and structured tools to identify and eliminate defects.

Empowering People

This management philosophy fits perfectly with the culture of empowerment we have been implementing at TLScontact. Our teams are already focused on solving problems when they happen, and improving processes when they see an opportunity. What we wanted was to give them tools to help them in this endeavour. The essence of the Lean Six Sigma approach is that it puts the focus on addressing the root cause of problems. This way, we can move away from firefighting – solving problems when they happen – to a more systemic view that allows us to look at why the problems are happening in the first place. It is also a more positive and empowering worldview, as it primarily seeks to find the fault in processes, not in people. When something happens, we try to understand how the process has contributed to the problem, and how to adapt the process to eliminate this flaw, rather than seek to blame the individual who might have made a mistake. This approach allows us to develop built-in quality, where we get it right the first time, rather than inspected-in quality, where we need to check for errors and correct them after the event.

Support From Management

In order for such a methodology to work, support from management, especially senior leadership, is important, as an article in Harvard Business Review points out. Projects with strong support from the head office showed 35% greater improvement after a year than ones without that support. They were also less likely to backslide, with 79% performing above baseline after a year, compared with 61% of projects not driven by the head office. We have heeded that lesson: our initiative has been driven from the top. But instead of focusing on mere statements and encouragement to the staff, we have decided to train our people to use a proven methodology and coach them when they are using it. Once people have been trained and coached, they can in turn become trainers and coaches for their teams.

So far, we have trained six regional teams, and we have “regional champions” in South-East Asia that are already applying the methodology in their daily work. At the same time, we have coached our Continuous Improvement Team in the Lean Six Sigma methodology. They are now able to train and support our operational and corporate teams around the world. These efforts will ensure that the methodology trickles down through our whole organisation in an organic way, creating a genuine cultural shift.

Systematised Thinking

One of the areas that we have been focusing on is the “A3 problem solving methodology” that gives people a framework to think and communicate about a problem they have identified. This eight-step methodology encourages people not only to describe the problem with precision, but also to use data to document their claims by evaluating its consequences. I call this “measurable problem statements”. It fosters a data-driven culture that helps us to understand and prioritise problems more efficiently, since we immediately start thinking in terms of quantifiable consequences. It also helps us to focus on measuring the impact of any proposed solutions: we quantify the gap between where we are and where we want to be. To this, we add the “Gemba walk” that is one of the cornerstones of Lean Management. In Japanese, Gemba means “the real place”. The idea is that managers indeed walk the floor and carefully observe what employees are doing, how they go about performing their daily tasks, but also ask them questions to understand what they are doing, the difficulties they are encountering, their ideas, etc. This in-person observation allows leaders to see the difference between what they assume is happening and what is actually happening. It complements any data gathered, to give a truly accurate understanding of a particular issue.

Building Trust

But why do we go to such lengths to ensure our teams become trained in this methodology of continuous improvement? It all boils down to trust. Our government clients are outsourcing sensitive administrative processes to TLScontact: they need to be confident that we are managing these well and have a clear overview of what we are doing on a day-to-day basis. Improving our processes instead of correcting errors when they happen allows us to eliminate what I call the “hidden office”: the extra time our teams need to spend checking and correcting data before it is passed on to the visa processing departments of our government clients. Improving processes means that we gain in efficiency by constantly increasing the built-in quality of our output. This is of the utmost importance for our clients: at the end of the day, they rely on the quality of the data we transfer to them. They base their decisions about granting or refusing visas on this data, so they must be sure that what they receive is flawless.

Naturally, this focus on built-in quality also benefits the customers that visit our visa centres. Not only do they get better and quicker decisions, but they also benefit from an enhanced customer experience. Finally, the Lean management approach has positive effects on our teams: by turning them into enablers of change, we reinforce their sense of purpose and belonging. This, in turn, makes them even more eager to build strong processes that benefit both our government clients and visa applicants, creating a win-win-win dynamic that benefits all parties.

Article written by
Greg Lane, Director of Compliance and Continuous Improvement

The post Leveraging Lean Management to Drive Quality in Visa Processing appeared first on TLScontact.