What Is Happening With My Visa? Automating the Question That Consumes Your Practice

Monday morning. I open my inbox and there are fourteen new emails. Three are from other agents or the Department. Eleven are from clients. I already know what most of them say before I open them, because the subject lines follow a pattern so predictable I could set my clock by it: “Any update?”, “Just checking in”, “Visa status please”, “Hi Lisa wondering if there is any news”, and my personal favourite, a completely blank subject line with a body that says simply ”???”

I do not blame these clients. Not even slightly. They are in the middle of one of the most stressful experiences of their lives. Their ability to live in Australia, to stay with their partner, to take the job they have been offered, to keep their children in the school they have settled into — all of it hangs on a decision being made by someone they will never meet, inside a Department they cannot contact, on a timeline nobody can predict. Of course they want to know what is happening. The question is perfectly reasonable. The problem is that answering it forty times a week is consuming a quarter of my working life.

I want to tell you about two clients who taught me that the way I was handling communication was not just inefficient — it was actively putting my practice at risk.

The Client Who Called Three Times in One Week

Ravi was a 186 employer-nominated permanent visa applicant. Good case. Strong sponsor, genuine position, salary well above the threshold. His nomination had been lodged, his visa application was in, health clearances were done, police checks were clean. The case was sitting with the Department in the processing queue and there was genuinely nothing to report. No request for further information. No case officer assigned. Just the quiet, interminable wait that every 186 applicant goes through.

Ravi called me on Monday to ask if there was any update. I told him the truth: the application was in the queue, processing times for 186 were sitting at around eight to twelve months, and we would hear from the Department if they needed anything. He thanked me and hung up.

He called again on Wednesday. Same question. I gave the same answer, this time adding that I would contact him immediately if anything changed.

He called on Friday. By this point I was frustrated — not at Ravi, but at myself, because I knew exactly why he was calling. He had heard nothing from me in three months. Three months of silence while the single most important application of his life sat in a government queue. From his perspective, the absence of information felt identical to the absence of progress. He had no way to distinguish between “the Department is processing your application normally” and “your agent has forgotten about you and your file is gathering dust.”

That Friday call took twelve minutes. Not because there was anything substantive to discuss, but because Ravi needed reassurance, and reassurance takes time when the client has lost confidence that you are paying attention to their case. Twelve minutes I could have spent on a case that actually needed my expertise.

Multiply Ravi by thirty active clients. That is the reality.

The Complaint That Should Never Have Happened

The second case still stings. An 820 onshore partner visa couple — let us call them James and Mei. Strong relationship, thorough evidence package, well-documented. I lodged their application and it went into the processing queue. At the time, 820 processing was anywhere from eighteen months to three years. There was nothing to do but wait.

I was busy. I had a wave of new clients, a couple of complex refusal cases, and an OMARA audit preparation that consumed two solid weeks. Two months went by without me contacting James and Mei. Two months is nothing in 820 processing terms — the Department had not even assigned a case officer. But from the couple’s perspective, two months of total silence from the person they had paid thousands of dollars to handle their case was unacceptable.

They filed a complaint with OMARA. The substance of the complaint was that I had failed to keep them informed about the progress of their matter. They were right. The Code of Conduct requires agents to keep clients reasonably informed. I had not. Not because I was negligent — the case was genuinely just sitting in a queue — but because I had no system that prompted me to reach out to clients when there was nothing specific to report. My communication was entirely reactive: I contacted clients when something happened. When nothing happened, silence.

The complaint was resolved with additional conditions on my registration for six months. No suspension, no fine. But the reputational damage, the stress, and the hours spent responding to the complaint were completely avoidable. A single monthly email — “Hi James and Mei, your 820 application is still in the processing queue. No case officer has been assigned yet, which is normal at this stage. Current processing times suggest we are unlikely to hear from the Department for another six to twelve months. I will contact you immediately if anything changes. No action is needed from you right now.” — would have prevented it entirely.

The Cost of Answering the Same Question

Let me put real numbers to this. During the last year of running my practice, I tracked my communication time meticulously.

I was spending between six and ten hours every week on client communications that were purely about status. Not advice. Not document requests. Not strategy discussions. Just variations of “your case is in the queue, nothing has changed, I will let you know when it does.” Six to ten hours of a MARA-registered agent’s time — time that should have been spent giving immigration advice, preparing submissions, or meeting with new clients — consumed by answering the same question over and over again.

And it was not just the time spent composing responses. Every status enquiry triggered a cascade of additional work. I had to check the current case status in HubSpot to make sure nothing had changed since I last looked. I had to review my file notes to remember what I had told the client previously, so I did not contradict myself. After the call or email, I had to create a file note recording what was communicated — because the Code of Conduct requires you to maintain records of all client communications, and any communication that includes substantive information needs a proper file note.

A five-minute email becomes a fifteen-minute task once you account for the checking, the context-switching, and the compliance obligations. Fifteen minutes multiplied by forty clients multiplied by roughly twice a month per client. The arithmetic is brutal.

Why Migration Communication Is Uniquely Difficult

Client communication is a challenge in every professional service. But migration has specific characteristics that make it significantly harder than most.

Extended Processing Timelines With No Milestones

A tax return takes weeks. A property settlement takes months. A partner visa takes years. During those years, there are long stretches where genuinely nothing happens. The Department does not send progress updates. There is no percentage complete indicator. The client simply waits, and waiting without information is psychologically unbearable.

Most professional service communication frameworks assume regular milestones. In migration, you need a communication strategy specifically for the periods when there is nothing to communicate.

Language and Cultural Barriers

A significant proportion of your clients do not speak English as their first language. Many are proficient but not fluent. Immigration jargon — “bridging visa,” “imposition period,” “ministerial intervention,” “skills assessment authority” — is impenetrable even to native English speakers who are not in the industry. When you combine technical language with the stress of an immigration matter, the result is clients who do not understand what you have told them, are too embarrassed to ask for clarification, and fill the gap with anxiety.

Communications need to be in plain English. Short sentences. No jargon. Clear next steps. This is easy to say and incredibly time-consuming to do manually for every client, every time.

Multiple Parties and Communication Channels

A single case might involve the primary applicant, their partner, an employer sponsor, a skills assessment provider, a health examination clinic, and occasionally a family member acting as an informal interpreter. Communications come in via email, phone, WhatsApp, WeChat, and sometimes handwritten notes dropped at reception. Each channel needs monitoring, each message needs a response, and every interaction needs a file note.

Compliance Requirements for Every Communication

This is the part that turns a manageable workload into an overwhelming one. Under the Code of Conduct, agents must maintain records of all communications with clients — written and oral. Any communication that includes substantive advice or information about the client’s matter requires a file note. Oral communications require a file note documenting what was discussed.

This means every phone call about a status update — even when the answer is “nothing has changed” — generates a compliance obligation. You cannot just answer the phone, reassure the client, and move on. You have to open their file, write a note recording the date, time, nature of the enquiry, and the information provided, and save it to the client record. The compliance burden turns a two-minute phone call into a five-minute administrative task.

What Automated Communication Actually Looks Like

I want to be precise about what I mean by automation here, because the word conjures images of impersonal mass emails — the kind of thing that would be completely inappropriate for immigration clients. That is not what this is.

Automated communication in a migration context means: when a specific event occurs, a specific, personalised email is sent to a specific client, referencing their specific case details. It is not a newsletter. It is not a bulk update. It is the exact email you would write manually if you had unlimited time, sent at the exact moment it should be sent, without you having to remember to do it.

Milestone-Triggered Updates

When I update a case stage in HubSpot — from “Documents Gathering” to “Application Ready,” from “Application Ready” to “Lodged,” from “Lodged” to “Case Officer Assigned” — the client receives an email within the hour. The email references their visa subclass, their specific case, and explains in plain English what the milestone means and what comes next.

For example, when an application moves to “Lodged”:

“Hi Ravi, I am writing to confirm that your 186 employer-nominated visa application has been lodged with the Department of Home Affairs today. Your application reference number is [reference]. The Department’s current published processing time for 186 visas is 8 to 12 months from lodgement. During this time, the Department may contact us to request additional information or documents. If that happens, I will be in touch with you immediately. No action is needed from you right now. I will send you a monthly update on your case status. If you have any questions in the meantime, please reply to this email.”

That email takes a human five to eight minutes to compose, personalise, and send. The automated version takes zero minutes because it was triggered by the CRM status change I was making anyway.

The Monthly Heartbeat

This is the automation that would have prevented the James and Mei complaint. For any active case that has not had a milestone update in the past thirty days, the system sends a monthly status summary. It pulls the current case stage from HubSpot, checks for any outstanding documents, and generates an email that says: here is where your case is, here is what we are waiting for, here is what you can expect next.

For cases in the long processing queue — 820 partner visas, 189 skilled independent visas during periods of slow processing — this monthly email is the difference between a client who feels informed and a client who files a complaint.

Document Receipt Acknowledgments

When a client sends documents — by email, by upload to the shared OneDrive folder, by any channel — they receive an acknowledgment within hours. The acknowledgment confirms exactly what was received: “Thank you, I have received your AFP police clearance (dated 15 March 2025) and your English language test results (IELTS, overall band 7.0). These have been added to your file. Your outstanding documents are now: health examination results (expected from Bupa Medical by 30 March) and your updated CV.”

This achieves two things. It eliminates the follow-up email from the client asking “did you get my documents?” And it gives the client a clear, current picture of what is still outstanding — which often prompts them to action the remaining items without being asked.

Intelligent Status Enquiry Responses

When a status enquiry email arrives — and they still arrive, even with proactive updates — the system can detect the nature of the enquiry, pull the current case information from HubSpot, and draft a response. The draft goes to me for review before sending, because I need to verify accuracy and add anything case-specific. But the research, composition, and compliance logging are done. What used to take fifteen minutes now takes two: scan the draft, confirm it is accurate, approve the send.

The Compliance Benefit You Cannot Afford to Ignore

Every automated communication is logged. The date, the time, the recipient, and the full content of the message are recorded in HubSpot against the client’s case record. When OMARA asks for your communication records — and they will, eventually, whether through a routine audit or a complaint investigation — you produce a complete, timestamped, unbroken log of every communication sent to that client.

Compare that to the typical manual approach: a mix of sent emails in Outlook that you have to search for, phone calls that may or may not have a file note, WhatsApp messages that are not recorded anywhere, and verbal conversations in your office that you meant to write up but forgot.

The compliance dimension is not a secondary benefit. It is arguably the primary one. The Code of Conduct requires you to keep clients informed and to maintain records of your communications. An automated system does both simultaneously. It is more compliant than manual communication, not less, because it never forgets to send an update and never forgets to log it.

Building This for Your Practice

What Changes When You Stop Being the Message Relay

I implemented this system in the final eighteen months of running my practice. The results were immediate and measurable.

Status enquiry emails dropped by approximately eighty per cent within the first two months. Not because clients stopped caring — because they already had the information. The monthly heartbeat emails were doing the work that I had been doing manually, inconsistently, and with far less detail.

My weekly communication time went from eight to ten hours down to about two. Those two hours were spent on substantive communications — responding to complex questions, explaining refusal options, discussing strategy changes — the kind of work that actually requires a registered migration agent. The status updates, the acknowledgments, the monthly check-ins ran themselves.

But the outcome I valued most was the one I did not expect. My relationship with clients improved. When every interaction between us was transactional — them asking for updates, me providing them — the relationship felt adversarial. They were chasing. I was being chased. When the routine communications were handled automatically, the conversations we did have were about their cases, their concerns, their futures. I became their adviser again, not their information desk.

The practice I sold was worth more because of this system. Not because the automation itself was valuable intellectual property, but because the client retention rate was exceptional, the compliance records were impeccable, and the new owner could see exactly how the practice communicated with every client, at every stage, without it depending on one person remembering to send an email.

If you are a migration agent reading this on a Monday morning with fourteen emails in your inbox, know that it does not have to be this way. Your clients deserve to be informed. The Code of Conduct requires it. And you deserve to spend your time on the work that actually requires your registration, your expertise, and your judgement — not on typing the same reassurance email for the fortieth time this month.