Questions from applicants – Ask the right person!

Avid readers of the Down Under Visa BLOG would have read the article I put up a couple of months back about who’s who in our office, and who does what.

Reminder coming up! https://www.downundervisa.com/posts/down-under-visa-key-personnel-and-contact-details

I also put up something additional on the email I sent out to clients with the Checklist. It goes like this:

And a REALLY important point on questions:

Lady applicants? You MUST contact us when you have questions. You must NOT ask your Australian Sponsor what to do. He doesn’t know either! Contact Sarah or Mila, and they will help you. This will save time, and it will give your Australian sponsor extra time to concentrate on what HE has to do. He has more to do than you do.

Australian sponsors? I know you want to be helpful, but you MUST insist that she contacts us. She has Sarah and Mila here to speak to. This is their job! They speak Tagalog, and unlike YOU they do know the correct answers. Try this: “Sorry darling, but you need to ask the experts at Down Under Visa about that!”

If you don’t do this, you will waste time and you will get things wrong. It may add months of extra time to your application by mistakes and wasted time.

This is really important!

Aussie males are all a fairly gentlemanly lot. We want to help our ladies and we want to be knights in shining armour.

And Filipina ladies love being taken care of and fussed over.

However……

Along with not reading Guidebooks and other supporting documents, one of the biggest causes of confusion and slowness is when the ladies ask their Aussie sponsors to answer their questions for them, or to help them with things that they simply CAN’T help them with. And the end result is further confusion!

• Sometimes the men give advice themselves, and sometimes this advice is horribly wrong!
• Other times (this happens ALL the time) she asks him about something………he asks us, and we explain……and he explains to her. And by the time it gets back to her, it’s either completely wrong or she ends up even more confused.
• And THEN he gets defensive and thinks we’re giving the poor girl a hard time because she’s now stressed and even more confused than she was before.

The answer is very simple, and it’s one we must insist on:

We have Sarah and we have Mila here who both speak Tagalog. Sarah’s primary role is to help the ladies! They can and should email her in Tagalog, and she will answer them in Tagalog. No language confusion, and no confusion from messages being passed from person to person and getting mixed up like a game of Chinese Whispers!

We are here to help, and we know what we’re doing. Don’t try to do it yourself! You don’t pop into the kitchen of the restaurant where you’re having dinner and start chopping the veges, do you? Neither should you try to manage your visa application when you’ve been wise enough to engage Down Under Visa to do it for you.

Please read THIS, and start directing questions to the right place. And we'll be more than happy to help.