Rural communities are the backbone of American life, providing fuel, food and fiber. As a partner, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) understands how critical rural America is to providing the everyday essentials our country depends on. As a result, we invest accordingly.
We are committed to keeping rural people healthy, kids educated and small businesses prosperous. To do so, we have implemented several customer experience initiatives to improve access and increase equity through our programs. This supports President Biden’s executive order instructing all federal agencies to improve the overall customer experience.
USDA Rural Development’s (RD) Customer Experience (CX) Team facilitated more than 400 virtual events to help staff provide information about agency programs to nearly 100,000 people and stakeholders in rural areas. The agency also piloted customer feedback surveys to improve program delivery to people in rural America.
Furthermore, RD’s CX team led the development, facilitation and data analysis of four roundtables and 26 listening sessions that sought feedback from 4,700 stakeholders, which helped inform policy for funding made possible by the historic Inflation Reduction Act.
RD enhanced lender experiences and improved service delivery for programs under the OneRD Guaranteed Loan Initiative by hosting focus groups, establishing performance metrics, creating customer journey maps, and more.
In addition to these initiatives, USDA has taken a leadership role across the federal government in delivering excellent, equitable and secure federal services and customer experiences. This is the end of our series celebrating the achievements since President Biden’s CX executive order was signed in December 2021. In case you missed it, you can view our fifth post: Two-Year Anniversary of Customer Experience Executive Order: Pt. 5 Improving Access to Food and Nutrition
We will continue to uplift USDA’s customer experience work to ensure a more positive experience for customers and employees, increase access to products and services, and improve service delivery. Future CX updates will be posted on the Office of Customer Experience (OCX) website and reported publicly on Performance.gov. To follow CX stories and posts across agencies, follow #govdelivers on social media.
