Customer Experience at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wanted to improve customer experience for our nation’s farmers, ranchers, benefits recipients, rural residents, and others who regularly interact with the agency’s programs and services through USDA.gov and affiliated websites. USDA, along with the GSA IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, partnered with Booz Allen to enhance customer experience (CX) at all digital touchpoints and grow its ability as an institution to deploy more customer-centric solutions. 

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue’s goal is to make USDA “the most efficient, most effective, and most customer-focused department in the Federal Government.” Those customers include farmers, inspectors, rural residents, and other stakeholders across a broad and diverse mission set that includes 29 agencies at more than 4,500 locations across the country and abroad. Among its many functions, USDA helps protect our nation’s crops from pests, ensure the safety and quality of our food supply, and provide loans to farmers across hundreds of applications.

Although USDA had previously implemented customer experience efforts, they were scattered and siloed across the organization and only focused on a small subset of customer experience—"customer service.” The department recognized it needed to increase the ability of its agencies to identify customer pain points and rapidly deploy effective solutions to address those pain points. 

USDA partnered with the General Services Administration (GSA) to be the "lighthouse" agency in its IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, with Booz Allen supporting the CX effort with our team of CX researchers and designers. Working side by side with USDA agency partners—through the process of co-creation—we were able to use our human-centered design and customer experience research to solve specific customer challenges, while giving USDA stakeholders the tools and frameworks they needed to stand alone and continue the work.

We know that the Federal Government can deliver exceptional service and we’re proud to partner with federal organizations to serve citizens in new ways. At USDA, we set out to:

• Create an enterprise-wide CX strategy to align with the mission
• Initiate CX improvement projects to demonstrate value
• Apply CX methods to create a customer-centric IT modernization strategy, playbook, and toolkit for internal USDA web managers
• Unify stakeholders—such as the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Office of Communications, and Office of CX—to leverage compliance of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (21st Century IDEA) as a blueprint for improving digital customer experience