Effective 1 April 2014, TelePerformance has now been appointed the new commercial agency to handle the front of house of all UK visa applications lodged in South Africa.
TelePerformance (www.tpcontact.co.uk) has replaced the Visa Faciliatation Service (VFS Global) having served South Africa for 5 years. It is the commercial agencies role to handle the front of house of visa applications. In other words, the UK government have cleverly outsourced the face to face handling of visa applications (specifically passports, finger prints, supporting documents and courier arrangements involved).
Given that this is TelePerformances first month of operation, we can conclude that the transition of commercial agencies has not been handled as efficiently as one would have hoped. The following facts can be drawn up:
1. TelePerfromance has yet too set up a call centre (like VFS offered) to help facilitate the visa application. Therefore there are currently no dedicated staff members to facilitate simple visa queries (nationally).
2. TelePerformance initially offered an online tracking facility on their website (requiring South Africans to not only lodge an online application on Visa4UK website but to then upon another application on their TPcontact.co.uk website) in order to track their application.
3. Effective 15 April 2014, TelePerformance no longer offer online tracking facilities (for now).
As previously mentioned, this transition period of handing over responsibilities between commercial agencies, is not going as smoothly as one would have hoped. Fortunately I can reassure South Africa that they are dealing with these technicalities (mainly the tracking facility) and in the future, tracking visa applications will easily be handled.
For now, South Africans are asked to be patient with this hand over. After visas have been processed, South Africans are also no longer receiving email, sms or any other notification for the collection or delivery of their application.
Both TelePerformance and the UKV&I are encouraging applicants at this stage to process paid for correspondence if they wish to have their visa queries addressed.
Applicants can consider phoning 021 300 3758 if they are looking to lodged their own (cost effective) application and 021 712 5080 if they are looking for a convenient visa experience (those willing to make use of Move Up’s industry leading visa solutions).