Dashboard Upgrade Helps Erickson Immigration Group Provide the Best Corporate Immigration Services in the Industry

Erickson Immigration Group (EIG) provides business immigration legal services for a wide range of clients — from small, innovative startups to industry-leading Fortune 500 corporations. They specialize in international immigration, non-immigrant visa, immigrant visa, and citizenship and naturalization services. They provide a high-touch service that relies on transparent and accessible data and dashboards as well as relevant and timely communication.

EIG partners with mobility, HR, legal, and other corporate teams (and their vendors) to ensure shared success. Their clients trust them not only for exceptional legal advice but also for outstanding service.

The Challenge

Simplifying an overly complex dashboard architecture and design into one that clearly shows program status and actionable steps.

The Impact

Multivariable data visualizations communicate valuable insights while reducing dashboard data by 80% and improving visibility and performance.

The Outcome

Streamlined Tableau dashboards lead to fewer data questions and requests, happier clients, and more interested prospects.

Tech and Data Challenges in Corporate Immigration

Obtaining visas and green cards for employees of corporations can be a difficult process, both in the US and internationally. EIG tries to make the experience as easy as possible. Key to that is the technology they rely on to provide their clients with accurate and timely data that alleviates stress and anxiety and provides them with transparency into their immigration journeys. Most businesses, regardless of size, typically don’t have sufficient in-house immigration expertise.

“It’s a difficult field,” notes Justin Parsons, Partner at Erickson. “The laws are complex. Managing the transactions is difficult and requires great attention to detail. Some of our clients employ up to 10% foreign nationals in their workforce. In the US and Canada, for example, there’s a dearth of STEM talent. Our clients can’t function without these individuals, so our services are critical to these businesses. We don’t directly provide human resources but we’re helping them acquire the resources they need to exist.”

In addition to the legal aspect, there’s a critical personal aspect as well. “We do a lot of expectation management — whether someone’s moving, getting their green card, or extending their visa. It’s a stressful process for the individuals involved, so we do a lot of personal management of these folks.”

EIG needed improved dashboards for their corporate clients to view the data for their respective programs. “Our clients give us a lot of work, but they don’t know how many cases they’re initiating, how many cases are getting approved or denied, or where people are coming from,” Justin says. EIG used Microsoft Power BI in the past, but not effectively. The data flowed from their case management system into a data warehouse and then into Power BI, but the tool just wasn’t telling the story that EIG needed it to. Their clients weren’t able to see the big picture or understand many of the data points that EIG needed to convey.

EIG had worked with another provider in the past but they weren’t completely satisfied. That’s when they learned about HIKE2.

“We were referred to HIKE2 by our sales engineer who asked around for recommendations of Salesforce shops that were good implementers,” Justin says. “The person that we spoke to at HIKE2 just jumped in, in terms of trying to solve some of our issues. And there was good follow through in the initial sale.”

Transforming Data Into a Useful Story

EIG’s prior dashboard overwhelmed and confused users. “It was made up of tons of little widgets. You had to know the data extremely well to get a full picture,” Parsons says.

Challenges included:

An overly complex dashboard architecture and design.

Too much data for the end-user to review in a strategic way.

No clear picture of actionable next steps.

EIG brought in HIKE2’s Advisory and Solution Services to coalesce all their data down and to tell a coherent story. They wanted clients to be able to look at their dashboard 5 or 10 minutes before going into a meeting and easily articulate the data to senior management. “Having those dashboards is a baseline for us in terms of table stakes,” Justin explains. “Not only do we do visas and green cards and facilitate moves, but we’re in the data business now. We don’t just handle cases. We have to explain the data, report on trends, and present everything to our clients in a way that makes sense.”

An Intuitive, Simplified, and Streamlined Dashboard

The solution was a Tableau dashboard which runs on the Salesforce platform. HIKE2 came in and clarified EIG’s objectives. The team identified the major points they needed to convey, cleaning up the logic as well as other issues with the data warehouse in order to present a clean story for EIG’s clients. HIKE2 used multiple visualization types to present complex information in multidimensional ways. The end result is a sustainable client dashboard that can continue to evolve and grow as the program grows.

Case data is now updated in client dashboards in real time. There may be five initiations, case approvals, or recruiter assessments in a day and clients can see the status of all that immediately.

HIKE2’s new Tableau Dashboard Project:

Produced cleaner data extracts that met client’s needs while being easier to work with and analyze.

Reduced the amount of dashboard data by 80% and components by 50% while improving usability and performance.

Created data visualizations that communicated actionable insights for the end user.

Overcame initial delays to come in on time and within budget.

“Our clients now have everything they need as far as overviews as well as the details of their programs. It satisfies their requests. The main data person for one of our clients uses it every day. They’re pretty data heavy, so they’re using it constantly,” Parsons notes. “Whenever we have a weak spot in the organization, we target it and figure out how we can solve that really quickly. And this project is a big piece of that in terms of our technology and how we’re presenting it to clients.

“Big picture, it’s boosted our ability to serve our clients. Our new dashboard checks the box. It’s something that we don’t have to worry about anymore in terms of the services we’re providing. It’s made access to our data much faster and easier.”

Justin Parsons
Partner, EIG

Improved Client Service, Satisfaction, and Retention

EIG’s clients no longer have questions about their data. They know where to find whatever they need. Many data requests and complaints about capabilities have been eliminated.

In the past, whenever EIG received data requests or tried to create financial forecasts or similar reports for clients, it could take up to three weeks to gather all the necessary data and respond to those requests. Now because the data is updated in real time, EIG can respond immediately. The case management and the data management teams verify that everything is working from the data warehouse. Data problems can be spotted and fixed right away.

“The biggest result is that HIKE2’s implementation of Salesforce products and the Tableau dashboard allow us to keep our clients. They’re always quick to tell us if they think there’s something on the market that they’re not getting from us,” notes Parsons.

EIG has also featured some of the new reporting features in their RFPs.

“It’s definitely shored up our process. A couple of years ago we may not have gotten some work because we didn’t have the technology and reporting capabilities. Now we’re closing on nearly everything that we’re bidding on,” Justin says.

The Road Ahead

EIG has just finished switching case management and forms systems after 10 years. They’re now moving to a Salesforce platform. “HIKE2 helped us with this dashboard and they also helped us with Experience Cloud portals for some of our clients,” Parson notes.

“Next up, we have a whole list of things that we’re going to implement with HIKE2’s help — to make the experience better for our corporate clients, the individuals we serve, and the people who work here at EIG, just to make all the work a little less daunting.”