Building Bots @ USCIS
The Client:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
The Challenge
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is responsible for all aspects of lawful immigration to the United States, including managing data requests of all types and sizes through its online and offline portals. For example, the agency receives thousands of change of address tickets from applicants every day – totaling over 1 million change of address requests every year.
Each ticket can take up to 10 minutes to process given the business rule requirements that must be met in both applications, current applicant status, and comparison of address data that must take place before entering the new addresses. Timely processing of these change of address requests is vital to both USCIS employees as well as the applicants themselves. Downstream effects of out-of-date addresses for applicants leads to case denials, PII and sensitive documents being sent to the wrong addresses, and an increase in the number of rescheduled or missed interviews. Vital USCIS resources are diverted from regular processing to search and recovery tasks when addresses are not updated quickly and accurately.
This process presented a clear opportunity for government leaders to use automation to increase efficiencies and allow staff to focus on mission-critical activities. And that’s where we come in.
THE SOLUTION
Our RPA team worked with USCIS to develop an attended automation for the change of address process using UiPath automation technology. The bot allows for standardization of the process steps across directorates within the web applications. All business rules are maintained by the automation, with cases not meeting expectations marked for manual review by staff. The only user action to run this bot is to click play and input the number of tickets to process on a given run. The bot can process a ticket in 2 minutes or less and completely removes the need for manual typing and business rule verification. It also updates the required address(es) in the system of record before returning to the tracking application, to send the requester an email notifying of the change and completion of the ticket. After completing a set of tickets, the bot saves an output MS Excel report to the user’s local machine for quality assurance review.
THE RESULTS
Over 7,000 change of address requests processed in 1 field office.
2000 tickets were processed in 1 month with a 60% completion rate.
Automated changes are completed in 2 minutes vs the 10 minutes it takes for manual changes.
