Embassy of Portugal in Brasilia launches new tool for consular assistance
The idea came from Tiago Rodrigues, second secretary of the Embassy and in charge of the Consular Section, who saw in this tool the opportunity to provide the community with a 100% automatic system, made up of menus, which will allow the user to obtain, in a simple and fast way, information on consular acts, without consuming human resources to the Embassy.
“Here in Brazil, Whatsapp is an essential communication tool. Everyone uses it for personal, professional or business purposes. And, in fact, as our human resources are scarce and the volume of calls and emails we receive is very large, we wanted to use a tool that can answer most of the questions people have”, explained to Lusa Tiago Rodrigues .
In this tool you can find information about the issuance of citizen cards, passports, necessary documents, prices and consular acts, as well as about appointments and times.
“Basic questions that are basically the most frequent”, explained the person in charge of the consular section.
The answers to these questions were already on the website of the Embassy of Portugal in Brasília, but a common diagnosis is that the internet pages are “increasingly institutional and less used by people in their daily lives”, which “ They want to have a functional communication tool, and in Brazil, Whsatsapp is that tool”, explained Tiago Rodrigues.
“It’s a tool that doesn’t consume the embassy’s human resources, it’s totally technology-based and that ours solves a problem that we’ve identified, which is a great need for information on the part of people who don’t look for the ‘site’. We took advantage of all this information that we already had and inserted it into the Whatsapp application”, he added, stressing that the feedback has been “very positive”.
The pilot project is taking place in Brasília and was officially presented by the secretary of the Estado das Comunidade Portuguesas tool, Berta Nunes, who is on the final stretch of her trip to Brazil.
If the experience of this new tool is well defined, it can be replicated by other consular posts in Brazil and, eventually, by the rest of the consular network around the world.
“The gain from this tool is immediate, because people who access the number soon learn many of the things they ask over the phone and in person. We’ve gained a lot with this tool and our hope is that the community becomes more syntax-informed about a number of things that until now asked otherwise. It’s a gain of time”, assessed the ambassador of Portugal in Brasília, Luís Faro Ramos.
MYMM // CFF