QC Immigration: Assumptions

For our communication project, we chose QC Immigration, a legal company based in London, as our company case.

Why QC Immigration?

When we were brainstorming our potential company candidates, one of our group members suggested QC Immigration to contrast other groups that seemed to prefer local Finnish companies. We were immediately of the idea that it will be interesting to study the communication patterns of a non-Finnish company and compare the results with those of local Finnish companies, thereby advancing our knowledge of business communication in different countries.

We also thought that we might have some basic ideas of businesses in the manufacturing and retailing industries, for example, but not legal companies. We assumed that the communication patterns may be very different—either extremely formal when communicating with regulators and governmental institutions, or relatively informal when communicating with employees, or using certain communication strategy in such a way that clients find its services professional and trustworthy yet not too distant. We are convinced that studying QC Immigration will definitely be a good platform where we can learn how communication works in the day-to-day operation and hopefully have some more ideas about the legal industry in general.

Assumption: Stakeholders and Communication Media 

Internal Communication

We assume that QC Immigration’s internal communication includes its communication with employees and possibly shareholders.

In terms of communication media, the communication among employees and between employees and the director could be face-to-face communication, meeting, via mobile phone and emails, or even Skype when the director is in the business trip. The conversation may be relatively informal.

Concerning the communication with shareholders, it might be meeting, traditional mail, or written report, where shareholders can get access to the information about the performance of QC immigration in general. Such communication, compared with the communication among employees and the director, may be relatively formal.

External Communication

We assume that QC Immigration’s external communication includes its clients, local court, as well as local government and the central UK government.

After visiting QC Immigration’s website, we learnt that QC Immigration provides services to those who would like to immigrate to the UK. For those clients who are already in UK, we assume that the communication media could be face-to-face consultation, emails, and via telephone or mobile phone. For those clients who are outside UK and plan to apply for residential permit or citizenship, the communication media would be more limited: may be only through emails. We think that the content might be between formal and informal. The reason is that QC Immigration may want to show that they are professional and trustworthy on the one hand, and try to break the stereotypical distance between lawyers and clients on the other.

Being the legal representatives of their clients, QC Immigration inevitably has to communicate with the local court. It may has to regularly report or communicate with its regulators, the local government and the central UK government as well. The communication media might be more traditional, that is, using mails or faxes. Its communication with court and governmental institutions could be the most formal.

In the situation where the confidential information will not be harmed, it will be interesting to see how these communications ranging from formal, moderate and informal communications are different from one another.

Communicating with the Public

Social media nowadays play an important role to show a company’s positive publicity. Based on QC Immigration’s website, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are used to communicate with the general public. We therefore would like to know whether QC Immigration has any goals it wants to achieve by using these social media and what kind of image it would like to show to the public, or even attract its potential clients.