From reactive to proactive services
First steps
People have a lot of questions when it comes to Migri’s service offerings and operations. The most common issues, as well as their causes, are well-known to the organisation, but cannot always be addressed immediately. At the moment Migri deals with customers mostly in a reactive manner. This means that questions are answered, and issues are dealt with when they surface or become relevant. The customer is mostly the one making the first move to get help, either by making a face-to-face appointment, calling, emailing or asking our chatbot Kamu.
Proactive approaches can be adapted in many ways, and we wanted to know what they could be in the context of Migri. Inland and other teams in Migri shared the hypothesis that taking more proactive solutions as part of Migri’s services could save time and help prevent additional stress for applicants in the future. Inland team identified potential key areas, ranging from availability of information, reminding customers of necessary actions to communicating the application progress.
What is the Proactive Migri-project?
The underlying question of “Proactive Migri” is to find answers to the question “How could Migri become more proactive towards their customers?”. The starting point to this were issues that had surfaced from Inland’s user research earlier in 2018. The project was led by Inland and executed in collaboration with employees from other units, mainly dealing with development of Enter Finland (Migri’s online application service platform) and UMA (Migri’s case management system) or who otherwise had a strategic placement in relation to the project.
Sometimes when we start a project, we don’t have a clear goal from the beginning. Proactive Migri started with a fuzzy focus; we knew the issues, came up with a vision and then started to figure out means to reach it.
Why is it important?
1 Customers struggle with uncertainty
Some applications can take several months to process. Long periods of silence during this time can cause people to question whether something is wrong with their application. This, consequently, can cause them to feel unsure and stressed.
”I can’t know what is happening with my application (in EnterFinland). I don’t know how much time it will take. — I’ve seen the same status for 8 months now.”
”Because sometimes you feel unsure when you apply and then there is big silence in between application and decision. And it is difficult to contact Migri, and get the information if there are problems, or how long the process will take.”
2 It all relates to Migri’s strategic principles
Communicating and acting proactively relates to two of Migri’s strategic goals: it increases efficiency and improves customer orientation. Important components of customer orientation are transparency and predictability, and they are both affected through proactive service solutions.
Efficiency
Proactive approaches save customers’ time on looking for a solution and Migri employees time on answering similar questions on a constant basis. Improving and creating new services that can solve problems without the need to involve a live agent, and helps Migri employees direct their resources to cases that require personal help. Proactive services can also help direct customers to self-service channels, where getting help might be faster.
Transparency
By making processes more transparent and understandable for people, we can increase their trust in Migri. Reaching out to customers and offering solutions to their issues before they require guidance shows both initiative and care. It also demonstrates that people’s problems have been heard and solutions are created or adapted to solve them.
Predictability
Steady updates make people feel at ease and let them know that their application process is moving forward. They will also know to act on time when something is required of them.
Vision
Based on the existing user research and benchmarked solutions, we came up with a vision: “Migri’s customers are up-to-date and happy as a result of Migri’s proactive communication”. The desired goal is that Migri communicates in a transparent and proactive manner to keep its customers up-to-date throughout any process.
At this stage we also needed to consider whether to focus on small improvements with relatively big impact or go for serious problems that would require a substantial amount of resources to implement, but would also have greater impact potential.
How to carry out the vision?
After coming up with the vision, we had to think of means to reach it. Several development areas had surfaced from user research, and provided basis for ideation. We identified two initial development “paths”. Path 1 was about improving how application status is communicated to the applicant in different channels. Path 2 focused on how applicants could be reminded when they need to complete certain actions, such as reapply for a residence permit when their old permit is about to expire. So far, our work has mainly focused on path 1 and turned out to have strong focus on Enter Finland as a channel. Development work related to path 2 will hopefully begin in the future as well.
Path 1: communicating application status through queue numbers
“When is my decision ready?” is one of the most common questions coming to Migri, and a matter continuously proven as stressful to people applying to live in Finland. We wanted to investigate more in depth what options we have on communicating the application status to customers in a more proactive manner. We interviewed substance experts on what is currently communicated to customers about their case status, benchmarked other immigration offices’ systems, sketched concept ideas and presented our findings and ideas to substance unit representatives, to hear their feedback and agree on next steps.
Proposed next steps of path 1
- tracking application processing times to test viability of a queue number system
- piloting the queue number system in one or more processing grounds
- improving Enter Finland’s usability by unifying the platform’s visual language and content into a consistent whole
Inland has compiled a list of next steps of development work. In the near future we need to define how and when to continue implementation in practice.
Editors: Suse Miessner and Mariana Salgado
