Reassurance for IRCC Clients

Posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2022

The poster shows people who have applied for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and had a great experience with the webform.

Client	Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada Client Support Centre services
Professor(s)	SuCheng Lee, Lanre Jenry-ljishakin
Program	Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design
Students	We are Michaela Trottier, Melis Burkay, Abhisekh Ravlekar and Saideep Reddy Yellu. We are team SAM-I-M, a team of UX researchers and designers. We value equality and diversity and we aim to improve the experience of those who contact the Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) call center. We care about accessibility and building trustworthy solutions for design problems using a design thinking lens.

Project Description:

The webform tracker is a ticket number solution developed for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) with the goal of decreasing the number of calls the Client Support Centre (CSC) receives. This solution provides clients with the ability to track the webforms with they have submitted with the ticket system in their IRCC application portal.

The project was developed by a team of four students from the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design program. The team selected a line of business to focus their research on, which is the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). After meeting with IRCC, as well as clients and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of the TFWP, they identified their needs and pain points and developed a solution that would help provide clients with the reassurance they need.

After conducting secondary research analysis, questionnaires, and interviews with SMEs and TFW’s, the team decided on the following problem statement: How might we improve the IRCC call center operations for temporary foreign workers?
While developing personas, and journey maps, and analyzing the collected data, the team concluded that one major factor in why clients call the CSC is for reassurance regarding the webform. Currently, when clients submit a webform to IRCC, they have no way of tracking how many webforms they have submitted or the status of the webform. Clients are not sure what happens to their webform after it is submitted and don’t know whether IRCC received their information or enquiry. This can lead to clients calling the CSC in a panic.

The Webform Tracker System would provide clients with a ticket number when they submit the webform, and users would be able to view previously submitted webforms in their account, as well as their status. This solution requires some user interface alterations to the account portals, as well as some system changes to adjust for the ticket system.

The team faced some challenges in this process, such as struggling to find targeted participants to interview in the time frame they were provided. But with determination and perseverance, they collected the data they needed to validate the concerns they discovered. They learned that tools such as Miro and Slack are valuable to communicate and organize research data, insights, and ideas. They also discovered that by identifying the strengths of each teammate and utilizing their skills accordingly, they could overcome any challenges they faced.

Short Description:

Addressing the 7% call answer rate with the CSC, we developed a webform tracking system that will provide more reassurance to clients and decrease the number of calls the CSC receives.

Contact the Team