Empowering students throughout the journey with personalised resources.

Project Description:

We began working on our project with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), when they reached out to us and explained the crisis that their Client Service Centre (CSC) are going through. They are facing a huge backlog at every channel of communication which hinders their normal operations and creates a bad experience for their clients. They wanted to understand why people feel the need to call and how they might reduce the backlog. Our team was responsible for the Study Permit line of business, which felt familiar as most of us made that journey only last year.
In the year 2021, Canada welcomed 450,000 new international students. They set a new record for the education industry in Canada and these numbers looked positive from afar. However, many international students have had their own struggles and a long journey to get here.
In the first phase, we set out to understand these journeys and collect as much information through secondary research. Applying a human-centred approach, we created and circulated questionnaires to gather key insights about their pain points and invited these participants for a semi-structured interview where they can share their personal stories and experiences. We also reached out to several Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand the challenges they tackle with their student clientele and what may make this easier for them.
In every part of our journey, we discovered that a major pain point for our applicants was the waiting time and lack of updates throughout their process. They wanted some sense of reassurance and wanted to feel the sense of human touch. We included various multimedia items to our solution to solve this problem. Videos, personalized tools, descriptive text material could not only help in assuring them but coming from a legitimate source will also help in tackling the problem of false information and the subsequent false alarms.
After gathering the qualitative and quantitative data, we analyzed it to present our research findings. Next, we used user experience strategies to form experience principles to guide our design intervention. We concluded that the solution should be user-friendly, support proactive communication, and provide relevant information to the applicants before they feel the need to call. This will empower the applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call loads on IRCC call centers.
Our design intervention includes a tool in the main IRCC site to provide the applicants (or potential applicants) a personalized set of resources of information in different formats, according to their specific situation: location, nationality, stage of the process, waiting time (if waiting), particular concerns or needs, etc. Student applicants tend to use the internet and search engines as a major source of information. This tool can enhance their research at each stage of their application process.
Furthermore, we use personalized emails and text messages to deliver follow-up information to our targeted users. This will give them reassurance throughout their waiting period and will further help in reducing their anxiety and uncertainty.
Our solution will help study permit applicants to get the information they need and wherever they need it. It will also empower applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call load from IRCC call centers.

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