- The government just made it a lot harder to get
an immigration appointment.
Standby and I'm gonna tell you all about it.
(light rock music)
Until now, if you wanted to make an appointment
to go down to the USCIS and talk to a live person
about your pending immigration case, you could
go online to a system called InfoPass,
find an appointment that suits you,
make that appointment, go down there,
speak face to face to somebody about your case.
It's a great system, but not perfect.
But, it's been useful.
One big complaint was, appointment dates, sometimes,
were two weeks out. Possibly longer, depending
on your location and when you were making the appointment.
However, recently, the CIS has changed that
and done away the entire InfoPass appointment system
and changed it to, what they're calling, InfoMod.
With InfoMod, you will not be able to make your own
appointment.
You're gonna have to jump through some hoops
to get an appointment, if they'll even allow you
to have an appointment.
And I'll detail that more in a minute.
But, first, I'll go back and tell you the reason
this has been changed.
Because of the easy-availability appointments,
a lot of people made appointments, right? It makes sense.
I've got a problem with my case.
I don't know what's goin' on.
I make an InfoPass appointment. I go down there.
I talk to somebody and I get an-answers.
Maybe satisfactory, maybe not.
But, at least I looked face-to-face
with a live person, expressed my concerns, my worries,
and I got some feedback.
And, in the past, we here at RapidVisa
have recommended that exact thing.
When everything else failed, make an InfoPass appointment.
See if you can get your case moving.
And we have found that it does work, uh, in getting cases
moving along or getting answers that you're not getting
from the regular contact support number at USCIS.
However, USCIS claims that 70-80% of the people
who are making these InfoPass appointments
were making them to ask questions that they
could've answered themselves online.
For example, timelines, how long's my case gonna take,
and so on, and they're right.
A lot of information is available online and you
can go into your case number, uh, you can find a lot
of great informational websites.
Or maybe, the answer they want is not there, or, at least,
they couldn't find it after some effort.
And, so, for those people, making an appointment
was a good option.
So, the CIS is saying 70-80% of the people
who made an InfoPass appointment made it for reasons
that didn't really require that appointment.
In other words, they could've gotten that information
another way.
Additionally, they say, about 20-25% of people who made
an InfoPass appointment never showed up and this,
ya know, wasted their time.
They had people available, waiting, ya don't show up.
But, the CIS decided that their answer to this problem
would be to significantly curtail your ability
to make an appointment.
So, what they've done, instead of now, going online,
make your appointment, go in, see someone face-to-face,
get some answers, express your concerns...
Instead of that process, now what happens is,
you call a contact center number.
Now, these people get 400,000 calls a month
at the contact center.
So, you call there, you're not calling and talking
to somebody right away.
We've all been through these busy call centers.
We know how that works.
And then I'm gonna get their IVR.
Now, that, we've all experienced those.
That's these machines that try to do everything they can
to keep you from getting to a live person.
So, we get past that.
Now we get to, what they call the Tier 1 Agent.
Now, the Tier 1 Agent is not a government employee.
This is a contractor. Tier 1.
Now, I've called, I've managed to get to a live person -
which, itself, requires some gymnastics - and now I've
got a live center, a live Tier 1 call center person.
Not a federal employee, but okay, I'll start with this.
So, now, I express my concern and, uh, they'll try
to answer it.
If I'm going to ask about timelines, uh, ya know,
when can I expect an answer to my case and so on.
They do, they are able to handle some - the basic level
questions, but, if your intent is to get an appointment -
you're fed up or whatever reason - you wanna sit
and talk to a live person.
You've gotta get past the gatekeeper, which is
the Tier 1 guy.
He or she cannot make an appointment for you.
So, you ask for Tier 2.
They're required, by policy, to give you Tier 2.
They'll try to resist it.
Once you get past that and you insist that you need to -
you wanna talk to Tier 2,
and, by policy, they're supposed to not deny
that request - whether they think it's justified or not.
Now, the Tier 2 - at Tier 2,
they are the people who, uh,
can make an appointment for you.
What Tier 2 is gonna do, is they're gonna call you back.
They're gonna commit to uh, having a Tier 2 person
call you back, they say, within 24-48 hours.
If you're not available, they're gonna try again.
If you miss the second call, that's it. They're done.
They're only gonna make 2 attempts.
They don't indicate how long they'll let
the phone ring and they don't even tell you
what time of day they're going to call.
What's effectively happened here is that the CIS
recognized a problem.
They said, "We've got 24-25% no show and in, of the people
that do show up, 70-80% of them are asking, uh, things
that could've easily been located online."
There are a lot of ways that this probably could have
been approached, but, their decision was, "Let's make
it harder to get an appointment. If we make it harder
to get an appointment, we will have less appointments."
What you can do, well, the only thing you
can do, unfortunately, is play their game.
But, to help you, you want to, when you get that Tier 1
person, you just wanna insist on Tier 2.
Uh, if you're having trouble getting Tier 2, ask
for a supervisor.
They are required, by policy, to give you Tier 2
if you ask for it and they're also required, by policy,
to give you a supervisor.
Last year, the CIS said it processed 8 million requests -
8 million petition requests.
They will have, by the end of the year,
800 call center people.
That's 10,000 requests per call center agent.
So, we have 1 person -
1 person to represent every 10,000 requests.
That a crazy ridiculous number.
Only in a government, only in a monopoly,
would you see something like that.
To give you an example, with RapidVisa,
our ratio is about 240 - meaning,
we have 1 person available,
answering the phone for every 240 customers that we have.
We're stuck with this system.
A cynical person might say
that we're putting up road blocks and making it hard
as possible to immigrate.
The CIS contact center call center
has never been incredibly useful.
It's now got even less useful.
The outlet we used to have was, at least, at the end
of the day, if that didn't work, we could make
an InfoPass appointment, talk to a live person.
Might not solve our problem, but, at least, we
had that gratification of looking at
that fellow human-being in the eye
and expressing our problem and our concern
and our questions.
Now, they, to a significant degree, have taken that away
or, at least, made that significantly harder to get
that service.
(upbeat music)
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(upbeat music fades out)