VFS Global speeds up service in 158 countries with a 360° customer view

Learn how the world’s leading visa outsourcing and technology service specialist resolves cases faster and at scale.

With streamlined service workflows and a unified customer view, VFS Global is delivering swift, seamless, and contextual customer support.

About VFS Global

As a leading outsourcing and technology service specialist, VFS Global embraces technological innovation, including generative AI, to support governments and diplomatic missions worldwide. The company manages non-judgmental and administrative tasks related to applications for visa, passport, and consular services for its client governments, increasing productivity and enabling them to focus entirely on the critical task of assessment.

Operating over 3,500 application centres in 158 countries, VFS Global has efficiently processed more than 309 million applications since 2001 and over 159.02 million biometric enrolments since 2007.

Trusted by 69 client governments around the world, VFS Global is committed to making the visa application process seamless and organised for its end customers. Its ‘first time right’ approach prioritises precision, accuracy, and consistency.

The Challenge

VFS Global’s reliance on multiple platforms led to fragmented data. This made it difficult for account managers and customer care agents to deliver seamless service, while also impacting operational efficiency.

Keen to build a 360-degree customer view on a single platform, VFS Global turned to Salesforce.

How Salesforce Helps

A unified customer view simplifies account management, improves service efficiency

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, VFS Global has streamlined the end-to-end process of managing client government data which includes opportunities, meetings, contacts, contracts, and pricing data.

All information on client government accounts is unified in a single view, making it easy for account managers to track the status and activity of each account by country, region, and city.

The company also uses Salesforce Service Cloud to build an omnichannel view of customer service queries coming in from various channels like phone, email, chat, web form, SMS, and WhatsApp.

The moment an agent enters the customer’s email ID or visa application number into Salesforce, reusable APIs built on MuleSoft fetch the customer’s details from various transactional systems.

The resulting 360-degree customer view helps agents resolve cases faster and more seamlessly.

“Earlier, our call centre agents used different systems to check the status of an application,” says Panchal. “But now, they have a real-time view of service interactions. They know which team is working on a case, where it’s stuck, if at all, and whether it needs more information from the customer. This helps them to follow up on cases more efficiently, and communicate with customers more transparently.”

Agents can also track what stage of the visa application journey the customer is at, and offer the right value-added services.

Approximately 4,570 users currently leverage Salesforce to serve customers across 158 countries.

Streamlined workflows strengthen compliance with SLAs

VFS Global also uses Salesforce to adhere better to the service level agreements (SLAs) of its client governments. Business rules defined on the platform ensure that every incoming call or email has the right SLAs attached to it.

Meanwhile, powerful dashboards simplify SLA measurement and monitoring.

“Since shifting from spreadsheets to Salesforce, we are able to monitor SLAs daily, report them weekly, and drill down into the data by country, visa application centre, service channel, case type, and various other parameters,” says Panchal.

Powerful encryption capabilities enhance data security

Given the sensitive nature of visa applications, VFS Global uses Salesforce Privacy Centre to encrypt, mask, and archive customer data in compliance with client government policies.

Supporting all these implementations is PwC, which has been a great strategic partner throughout VFS Global’s Salesforce journey.

“They’re collaborative, open, transparent, and constantly looking to improve – all of which is critical in a complex deployment like ours,” says Panchal.

The Salesforce Difference

Serving client governments and their end customers across multiple geographies, visa application centres, service channels, and transactional systems can seem like a challenging ask. But with Salesforce unifying data in a single source of truth, VFS Global has simplified the process. Teams can now manage client accounts and resolve cases with the speed and transparency that customers expect and deserve.