Very poor customer experience at VFS (UK Visa)

[yardrunner]

I'd like to describe my experience with VFS Global and what appears to be the total lack of effective monitoring of the service by the UKVI.

 

On July 3d my daughter visited the visa4UK website and paid 124USD for a standard six month visa application (why couldn't she pay in GBP).  She then went to the VFS global website to book an appointment and that's then the problems started.

 

She started to fill in the required information and when she reached the page where you upload documents, none of the links worked so so decided that she would have no option but to pay the extra fee for VFS to upload her supporting evidence in the Visa Application Centre in Bangkok.

 

She then continued to the the appointments page, the button for the earliest day was already selected, in fact it was the only option shown, with a list of times and a link to show other appointment times, none of which worked, so my daughter left it and tried again an hour later with the same result, my daughter and I made numerous attempts to make an appointment without success, as late as midnight and as early as 4.00 am. We kept on trying for the next two days before giving up in utter frustration after which daughter have no other option but to pay the fee for the walk in option. however on arrival on arrival at the VAC all the walk in slots had gone and had no other choice than to pay the VFS fee for premium service, an extra 3860 Baht (£100 just to visit the VAC as part of the process)  In the meantime I reported our problems via the VFS website, I suspect we were not alone.

 

The first response from VFS was

Dear Customer, Have you tried clicking the arrow beside the box showing day and date? The arrow will allow you to view dates with available appointment schedule

 

I replied

No this did not work and the page you show is different to the one on your website

 

They replied

can you send us a screenshot of the problem, I sent a message

why dont you follow the log in and booking form on your website to find out what is happening on your website

They informed me that they had tested the website and it was working fine a lie. I sent a message back saying it was not working and was asked to send a screenshot of the whole form which I did in 5 pages. I got this reply

 

Dear Customer,

Apology for the inconvenience this system error caused you, we have already forwarded your concern to the corresponding team to resolve your problem. Once we received an update and instruction we will inform you as soon as possible

 

and yesterday 11/07/2019 I received another message

Dear Customer,

 

Please see below advice from our IT Team

For the below mentioned applicant with appointment is not confirmed. Request the applicant to login and schedule the appointment now.

 

Thank you.

I logged in again and it was still not working

 

and it still does not work.

 

 

I complained to the UKVI and was told complaints have to be raised with VFS in the first instance and you have to wait for an answer from VFS before you can escalate the complaint to the home office.

 

It seems to me that the issues with uploading supporting documents are well known as are the unavailability of standard appointments, I'm sure that the difficulties my daughter and I encountered are not just restricted to us, we could be forgiven for thinking that the VFS website is designed to ensure that applicants are almost compelled to use the premium routes when submitting their process.

 

I would have thought that the UKVI would have put robust monitoring processes in place when the contract to opperate the visa application process was awarded, but it seems not to be the case, in fact I have to wonder if there is any monitoring whatsoever. The response from the UKVI will not even start to look into my concerns until I have received a final response from VFS shows the complete apathy they seem to show to applicants. 

[rasg]

15 hours ago, yardrunner said:

We kept on trying for the next two days before giving up in disgust and my daughter decided that she would have to go to Bangkok and do the application in person at the VFS global offices at the Trendy building in Bangkok. She missed the walk in and had to pay for premium service an extra 3860 Baht.

I'm a bit confused by this bit. Your daughter would have had to go to VFS to supply biometrics etc whether she had been able to make an appointment or not.

 

All of the new services have lots of optional extras since the various governments contracted services out. Some not so optional. Sopra Steria is a French company that runs the visa services in the UK and they have around 8 "core" centres where "some" of the appointments are free. Difficult to get as thry only show appointments for two weeks in advance. At the other centres, appointments start at £60. Most are £60 or £120. 

 

The self upload works fine in the UK but when my wife went for FLR, the whole system was down for four hours. We still managed to submit my wife's docs though by going for a nice lunch for a couple of hours and then waiting.

[Tony M]

13 hours ago, rasg said:

I'm a bit confused by this bit. Your daughter would have had to go to VFS to supply biometrics etc whether she had been able to make an appointment or not.

 

All of the new services have lots of optional extras since the various governments contracted services out. Some not so optional. Sopra Steria is a French company that runs the visa services in the UK and they have around 8 "core" centres where "some" of the appointments are free. Difficult to get as thry only show appointments for two weeks in advance. At the other centres, appointments start at £60. Most are £60 or £120. 

It seems to be plain business greed, "forcing" applicants, or "persuading" applicants to pay for various services. The cost of scanning documents at VFS went up recently from 150 thb to 460 thb.  When you see how difficult it is to upload documents yourself at home, you can maybe see a correlation between that and the price rise.

 

Sopra Steria were very recently reported, I believe, as being associated with a firm giving immigration advice in the UK, and there were accusations that FLR applicants were being pointed towards that company to seek immigration advice. There is an article in The Independent (today, I think, or yesterday) about UKVI's outsourcing to Sopra Steria and others.

[GroveHillWanderer]

I guess everybody's experience varies but I had no problem choosing a different appointment slot. The slots they were suggesting were in a week when we couldn't go so I chose one in the following week. 

 

It might depend on what browser/operating system you use.I was using Internet Explorer on Windows 10.

[rasg]

20 hours ago, Tony M said:

It seems to be plain business greed, "forcing" applicants, or "persuading" applicants to pay for various services. The cost of scanning documents at VFS went up recently from 150 thb to 460 thb.  When you see how difficult it is to upload documents yourself at home, you can maybe see a correlation between that and the price rise.

Most use sheet scanners at home and scanning was a bit of a chore and it took me a few hours but it was good to have control over what was scanned and uploaded and the ability to check that everything was sent with no mistakes. I like the new system and it removes the chance of something going missing.

 

I know that Sopra Steria use stack scanners that can scan both sides of the sheet at the same time. They are more expensive than single sheet scanners but the time saving for SS means it makes total sense. It's not a huge rise in comparison to most of the extras and the price of things like appointments but I agree with you. It's a money making exercise and most of the extra fees are a ripoff.

[Tony M]

24 minutes ago, rasg said:

Most use sheet scanners at home and scanning was a bit of a chore and it took me a few hours but it was good to have control over what was scanned and uploaded and the ability to check that everything was sent with no mistakes. I like the new system and it removes the chance of something going missing.

 

I know that Sopra Steria use stack scanners that can scan both sides of the sheet at the same time. They are more expensive than single sheet scanners but the time saving for SS means it makes total sense. It's not a huge rise in comparison to most of the extras and the price of things like appointments but I agree with you. It's a money making exercise and most of the extra fees are a ripoff.

It's an incredible rip off. If you take just one small example. VFS Bangkok will send the applicant an SMS for 85 THB, to inform them that the decision is back from Delhi or Sheffield. Call that 2 GBP.  If they send 100,000 SMS in a year (and Bangkok VFS was dealing with more visa applicants than that in a year), that is, by my reckoning, 200,000 GBP. For what ?  It's not as if they have someone sitting in Bangkok sending the 100,000 SMS. It's automatically generated by the system.  A rip off, indeed.

[ThaiBunny]

1 minute ago, Tony M said:

t's an incredible rip off. If you take just one small example. VFS Bangkok will send the applicant an SMS for 85 THB, to inform them that the decision is back from Delhi or Sheffield. Call that 2 GBP.  If they send 100,000 SMS in a year (and Bangkok VFS was dealing with more visa applicants than that in a year), that is, by my reckoning, 200,000 GBP. For what ?  It's not as if they have someone sitting in Bangkok sending the 100,000 SMS. It's automatically generated by the system.  A rip off, indeed.

As I recall it's an option, you can choose it or not. If it were mandatory it would be a rip-off, but you're a customer which means you can choose to buy that service or not. If something is over-priced that doesn't mean it's a rip-off

[Jip99]

Just now, ThaiBunny said:

As I recall it's an option, you can choose it or not. If it were mandatory it would be a rip-off, but you're a customer which means you can choose to buy that service or not. If something is over-priced that doesn't mean it's a rip-off

 

 

Something over-priced is always a rip-off.

 

Take your pointing about buying the sms service or not - but the 'free' email is usually a day later before you know that a decision has been made.

[Tony M]

1 minute ago, ThaiBunny said:

As I recall it's an option, you can choose it or not. If it were mandatory it would be a rip-off, but you're a customer which means you can choose to buy that service or not. If something is over-priced that doesn't mean it's a rip-off

Agreed, but if you don't pay for the service, and virtually every visa applicant that I know does, then you may not know when your passport is back at VFS waiting for you to collect it (unless you also paid for the "courier" service).

[Tony M]

6 minutes ago, Jip99 said:

 

 

Something over-priced is always a rip-off.

 

Take your pointing about buying the sms service or not - but the 'free' email is usually a day later before you know that a decision has been made.

Again, agreed, but I can assure you that not all Thai visa applicants have regular access to email.  It was just an example of the kind of money that VFS and Sopra Steria are making from visa applicants. If you are happy with that, then no problem. I see it, and the original OP, as outsourcing companies making big money from UK visa applicants, and possibly using unfair means to push the applicants towards overpriced "services".  My opinion only, of course.