customer service

Now more than ever, people expect to have a good experience when interacting with companies or organizations. Whether the interaction stems from a question, the desire to provide feedback, or an inquiry about services, a good customer experience is built on good customer service. In its simplest form, customer experience works to understand the entire end-to-end experience in order to enhance each interaction, better understand a customer’s needs, and leverage learnings to improve service.

The value of a healthy start in life cannot be overstated. It’s what everyone deserves and is a critical foundation for a successful and self-sufficient future. At USDA, we deliver on that promise, by ensuring healthy beginnings through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC.

USDA has committed to becoming a facts-based, data-driven, customer-focused organization. One of the Department’s two Agency Priority Goals (APGs) for FY18-19 is to develop the USDA Chief Executive Officer (CXO) Dashboards, which integrate data from systems spanning the agency’s 29 agencies and staff offices, and provide the Department with enhanced capacity to collect accurate, reliable, complete, accessible, and consistent data. With this initiative, USDA will have created the first Cabinet-level suite of comprehensive administrative dashboards for seven administrative functions: human resources, information technology, finance, property, procurement, security, and operations.

Last week, USDA Acting Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services (FNCS), Brandon Lipps, made a whirlwind trip to San Antonio, Texas, to serve as the keynote speaker at the National Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) National Child Nutrition Conference and visit local sites operating FNCS programs. The highlight of his conference remarks was announcing the availability of $5.4 million in training grants to help child and adult care providers deliver first-class meal service.

In today’s school cafeterias, program operators work in fast-paced environments requiring quick and convenient access to resources to properly feed our nation’s children and effectively manage their programs. To meet this crucial need, USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) has released several exciting technology-based resources and tools to help them do just that.

Wholesome meals at school support educational achievement – and bright opportunities ahead for our nation’s kids and teens. Which is why, each year, during National School Breakfast Week (March 5-9), USDA recognizes the importance of a healthy start and the many ways the School Breakfast Program improves the health and nutrition of school children nationwide.

Over the past two years, USDA has undergone a major redesign of USDA.gov and most Agency and Office websites.  While we’ve taken major steps to improve the user experience and usability through a streamlined and modern look and feel, we continue to learn and expand on these improvements as we progress through our redesign processes.

As part of this redesign, we focused on further optimizing the homepage for ease of use and to maximize resource exposure for USDA.gov users based on Federal best practices and lessons learned from prior USDA Agency website redesigns. Web and social media analytics also provided key insights to popular content and user preferences, which we continuously evaluate to make adjustments to our digital content.