Immigration officials defend contractor-operated call center

The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday defended its expanded use of a national call center, staffed mostly by contract employees, to answer questions about immigration benefits and applications.

Union officials and groups representing lawyers have criticized the center for failing to provide timely and accurate answers to customers' inquiries and have pointed to the toll-free service as an example of what happens when contractors are left to answer questions traditionally fielded by federal employees.

BCIS has operated a call center for several years, but in June began directing a higher volume of calls to the center, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. On June 9, BCIS instructed all customers encountering problems with immigration-related forms to call the toll-free number, as opposed to local customer service centers where BCIS immigration officers and contact representatives work, said Crystal Williams, a spokeswoman for the association.

As a result, customer service has suffered, which should give BCIS pause when it considers handing more work traditionally tackled by immigration officers over to contractors, said Mary Lynch, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2076.

BCIS plans on subjecting 1,143 immigration officer and contact representative jobs to public-private competitions by June 30, 2004. A formal announcement of the competition will be made within the next few days, BCIS spokesman Russ Knocke said.

Both immigration officers and contact representatives serve as customer service specialists at BCIS offices. They usually fall between pay grades GS-5 and GS-8, and are responsible for answering questions about immigration applications as well as determining eligibility for some benefits. There is virtually no distinction between the positions, according to Dan Kane, a BCIS spokesman.

In an American Immigration Lawyers Association survey released in late August, 79 percent of the 515 lawyers, representatives of community organizations and members of the general public who responded said they were unhappy with their experience with the call center. More than 60 percent gave the toll-free number an overall rating of 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 indicates the highest level of satisfaction.

Survey respondents were particularly dissatisfied with the lack of "meaningful assistance" provided by call center employees. More than 60 percent said that a call to the toll-free number had not resulted in any useful information.

"In many instances, the only thing an operator could tell a caller to do was to write a letter to the service center; an effort long recognized as an exercise in futility, as such correspondence is rarely addressed in a timely manner, if at all," a summary of the survey results stated.

Poor service at the call center is not necessarily a negative reflection on the contract employees staffing the phones, Lynch said. Rather, she argued, it shows that that no contractor is equipped to handle the types of questions that immigration officers routinely answer.

Call center contract employees lack the extensive training of immigration officers, and also lack access to databases of information on the status of individual immigration cases, Lynch said. When contract employees at the call center refer cases to federal immigration officers, they often fail to correctly communicate the issues at hand because they lack adequate experience in immigration matters, Williams added.

But BCIS is generally satisfied with the way the call center is handling inquiries, Knocke said. BCIS conducted its own customer satisfaction survey about six weeks ago and found that 80 percent of respondents were satisfied with the toll-free number, he said.

The national call center helps BCIS customers receive faster answers to their questions, Knocke said. Those calling local agency service centers directly often received a busy signal, he said, so the toll-free number provides greater accessibility.

Knocke acknowledged that there are some problems with the call center, and said BCIS is working with such groups as the immigration lawyers' association to improve the service. Williams confirmed that BCIS is weighing her group's criticisms of the center.

But Knocke said BCIS does not see possible shortcomings of the contractor-operated call center as a reason to alter its plans to compete immigration officer jobs. "I don't see a correlation," he said.

In general, unsatisfactory contractor performance should not be a reason to halt the competitive sourcing process at government agencies, said Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president and counsel at the Professional Services Council, an Arlington, Va.-based contractors association. It should prompt agencies to re-examine the terms of a contract, training provided to contract employees, or any other number of factors that might be contributing to poor performance, he said, but should not deter future job competitions.

"Often, there's this knee-jerk reaction that one contractor isn't performing well, then no contractor can do the job," said Mark Wagner, vice president of government relations for Johnson Controls Inc., a Florida-based contractor. "That is a wrong assumption."