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Survey of New Zealand visa and permit applicants who have used an immigration adviser

Conducted for the Immigration Advisers Authority by Premium Research

The Immigration Advisors Authority (IAA) recently conducted a survey of visa and permit applicants who have used an immigration adviser. The aim of the research was:

To provide benchmark measures of the performance of immigration advisers (from the perspective of their clients) to help measure the effects over time of the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007.

Immigration adviser licensing became mandatory on 4 May 2009 for onshore advisers and is mandatory for offshore advisers from 4 May 2010. 

The survey of applicants who use advisers was undertaken using an online methodology.  Visa and permit applicants who had received advice from an immigration adviser in the eight months prior to 4 May 2009, with personal email addresses on record, were invited to participate in this survey. The questionnaire was provided in English and eight other languages. A total of 1,137 applicants completed a survey. This document gives a brief summary of the survey findings.

The survey included applicants who had used licensed, unlicensed and exempt advisers.

Overall Satisfaction

All applicants were asked how satisfied they were with the overall quality of service provided by their adviser.  In total, 63 percent of applicants said they were satisfied with the service (giving a rating of 4 or 5 out of 5).  Overall satisfaction by status was as follows:

Applicants were asked to rate their adviser on client service; communication; provision of information; timeliness; written agreements; and cost.  In each case licensed adviser results were statistically significantly higher when compared to unlicensed adviser results.

Recommend Adviser

In total, 70 percent of applicants said they would recommend their adviser to friends or family. Recommendation of adviser by status was as follows:

Positive Comments

The key types of positive comments made about adviser service were as follows:

Negative Comments

Negative comments about adviser service were as follows:

Service Improvement

All applicants were asked what the one thing was adviser could do to improve their services. The key improvements mentioned were as follows:

The key priorities for improvement as identified in this research (being those which have the greatest impact on clients’ overall satisfaction and areas where performance is currently only average or below average) for both licensed and unlicensed centre around providing:

Location of Applications

Forty percent of applications were made onshore and 60 percent of applications were made offshore. The offshore locations applicants were in when they made their application were: India (23%), Philippines (13%), Malaysia (4%), South Africa (3%), United Kingdom (3%), China (2%), Fiji (2%), Australia (1%), Bangladesh (1%), Russia (1%), Saudi Arabia (1%), Singapore (1%), Sri Lanka (1%) and Thailand (1%).

Finding an Adviser

The primary means of finding an adviser was via friends and family (52%). The second most common means was via the internet (19%).  

An executive summary of this survey is also available online.