You know all about the necessity of having a written agreement in place with your clients. Doing this takes up a huge amount of your time though – several minutes per client, in fact. Every day I help immigration advisers improve productivity in their business so I see first-hand how the cost of this simple administrative task quickly adds up.

Here’s another thing – I know the solution is super simple. By automating the process, you can reduce the time it takes to create essential written agreements for your clients from several minutes down to a couple of seconds. If you’re a fast clicker of your computer’s mouse, you can probably do it in one second.

Even though many immigration advisers in NZ are not fully utilising the benefits yet, automation is a big deal. The respected McKinsey Global Institute published a report on automation in January 2017. It found that automation could improve productivity by up to 1.4 percent. To put this into perspective, the introduction of the steam train in the 19th century increased productivity by just 0.3 percent. The dramatic growth in the use of IT in the 1990s increased productivity by 0.6 percent. Automation is likely to have a bigger impact on worldwide business than these two revolutionary developments combined.

Many of New Zealand’s workers back this up. Whether their employers are embracing automation or not, 44 percent of people in NZ think they do a lot of repetitive tasks that would benefit from automation.

Automating Written Agreement Creation in Your Business

How do you automate the creation of written agreements for your immigration clients? Ezymigrate has the solution. Not only that, you can automate the creation of all the standard letters you send to clients too.

Here’s how it works:

·     Setup templates – you create whatever agreement and letter templates you need with the flexible tools available in the system. This includes adding your own terms and conditions.

·     Add dynamic fields – Ezymigrate has dynamic fields for information like client name, client address, services and balance etc. Add these to your templates too.

·     Create written agreements – when looking at a client file in the system, click new agreement and the template will automatically populate the client’s information ready for you to send.

If you manually create written agreements for each new client by copying and pasting, it’s time to stop. Ezymigrate will bring automation to your business.

How many steps do you go through as an immigration advisor to record information from clients in a way that is compliant with IAA guidelines? How long does it take you? I’ve seen the process so I know it’s time-consuming. That’s why we decided to fix it with a feature in Ezymigrate.

We did this by digitising and automating the process.

On Business.com, Jonha Revesencio explains several advantages of digitising business processes. Immigration advisors in New Zealand can benefit from them all, including making your business more efficient while also saving you time and money. According to the article, you can do this by directing the time you normally spend processing and storing physical copies of client forms into other areas of your business – such as marketing.

What about automation? According to Jeff Charles, automation can make your business considerably better. In an article on Small Business Trends, Charles says automation is not only about getting things done faster and cheaper. Instead, it is about doing things better as well. He says automation helps you work smarter rather than harder.

IAA Compliance

All this is interesting, but how does it relate to recording information from clients in a way that’s IAA compliant? That’s where Ezymigrate comes in – in fact, it’s the only solution available that enables you to digitise and automate the process of obtaining client information while remaining IAA compliant.

The system does this through digital questionnaires. Here’s how it works:

You select a questionnaire – there are options for study, visit, work, and residence visa applications.

You send the questionnaire by email to your client – add a personalised message to the client and click send – that’s it.

The client completes the form electronically – after the information is entered, the client simply clicks Submit to send the form back to you.

Ezymigrate automatically stores and distributes the form – the form instantly becomes part of the client’s file and is accessible in the client’s history. The form is also automatically sent to the client’s email address for their records and to the email address of the immigration advisor responsible for preparing the visa application.

In other words, the IAA requirement that an immigration adviser communicates directly with the client is achieved as the immigration adviser working on the case personally sends the questionnaire to the client by email. Also, proof that the client returns the completed questionnaire is recorded in the system. In addition, the immigration adviser gets a copy of the questionnaire sent to them by email as a PDF document. This creates a paper trail that you can use if the client files a complaint to the IAA.

Your involvement in creating this IAA compliant paper trail takes seconds – the time it takes you to select the form, type a quick message to the client, and click send.

Compare this to your current manual system of sending a client a physical form, getting them to complete and sign it, scanning the form so you have a digital copy, and then filing the physical copy for future reference.

In other words, Ezymigrate’s digitised and automated process will save you considerable amounts of time.

So, now you too know how to comply with IAA guidelines the easy way – give it a go today.

Of course, we are tech developers independent of IAA, however, we have developed our system with help from immigration advisers. We can’t say it will make you 100 percent IAA compliant – nobody could – but Ezymigrate will make your compliance work processes more efficient.