Reducing application stress
There are a variety of things you can do to reduce the stress of a visa application or appeal. The obvious is of course using a professional to manage your application on your behalf, but even then some clients can be quite stressed. The biggest cause of stress for clients that we see comes from unrealistic expectations about INZ.
Time frames given by INZ for the processing of an application often mislead clients to believing that the application will be decided on that date or before. The time frames posted on the INZ website are an average, meaning some will be faster and some will be much slower. For example for a visa with a time frame for processing posted as 45 days, it is possible to get the visa in 4 days as much as it is posisble to take 4 months.
There are some techniques we use to increase the speed an application is processed, but this does not include asking INZ to move faster. INZ is not responsive to pressure to treat any particular application specially, unless there are exceptional circumstances. Exceptional circumstances does not include things like "I have booked my flights so I need the visa", for example.
The other main cause of stress we see is that some clients expect INZ to be efficient, fair, logical and service oriented. To be fair, INZ does promote itself as having or wanting to have these qualities, but overall it does not. INZ is a government department, so they tend to do what they like and at the same time be bogged down by bureaucracy. While some staff at INZ do have these qualities of fairness and so on, it is hugely variable and for every fair minded and logical immigration officer, there are 5 others who are not.
The other really common source of disappointment comes from expecting some kind of precedent or consistency. The phrase that makes us cringe the most is; "I have done this before, or my friend has done this before so it should work for me now too". This attitude is a certain path to disappointment because it just doesn't work like that. The same case officer will treat things differently, different case officers will certainly treat things differently, and external or internal policy changes will definitely make things different within very short spaces of time.
Understanding these points gives you a better experience with immigration in NZ. When we do applications we always start with the basis that it is going to take ages so what can we do to speed things up, and we expect that the case officer is going to be mean spirited, ego-centric, officious and unfair, so what can we do to prevent unfair treatment and bias. Then if we get a good case officer and the application goes through faster than expected, it makes for a happier experience.