The Voice of the Customer (VOC) Departmental Regulation is designed to listen, learn, and act on customer's feedback about their experiences with USDA products or services.
It seeks to better understand USDA customers and how they interact with the Department. In general, the Departmental Regulation outlines how each Mission Area, agency, and staff office will organize feedback using Voice of the Customer principles. To learn more, you may view the full Departmental Regulation.
If you are a high-impact service provider (HISP) and already have a customer listening tool in place, you can use that same listening tool to satisfy the VOC regulation requirements.
Setting Up Feedback using Voice of the Customer
Every Mission Area or agency of the USDA will structure their feedback around Voice of the Customer (VOC). Use the checklist below for assistance implementing VOC for your mission area or agency:
- Identify a program or service that interacts a lot with customers. The more customer interactions, the more feedback the Mission Area or agency can use implement the Voice of the Customer DR.
- Identify the best way to get feedback from customers. The program or service needs to have a listening tool in place to collect feedback.
- To understand how customers best give feedback, conduct a few listening sessions. It can help you learn from your customers directly. Listening sessions could be with town halls or in a contact center or even just having a conversation with customers.
- Listening tools must be approved by the Mission Area or agency and OCX.
- OCX recommends communicating with OCX and Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to see what tools are currently available for use, whether a paid subscription, Touchpoints (a government-built and Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)-friendly listening tool), or another option that works better for your mission area.
- Implement the selected listening tool. The listening tool collects customer feedback and develops insights for program and service improvement.
- OCX recommends selecting listening tools that are quantitative in nature.
- Submit reports to OCX. Reporting will begin in the 2025 Fiscal Year; more information to follow.
- Measure progress over time. To grow the selected program and service based on the feedback provided, OCX, Mission Areas, and agencies will continually review and assess feedback. This helps to identify areas of improvement and opportunities to inform future decision-making.
For additional information and guidance on metrics, check out the Research section of the Digital Strategy Playbook.