Office of Citizen Services and Communications
The Office of Citizen Services and Communications (OCSC) helps citizens, businesses, and other governments to easily obtain information and services from the government on the Web, via e-mail, in print, and over the telephone. OCSC also provides information to the media, Federal agencies, the general public, and GSA internal audiences on the activities of GSA and its associates. OCSC manages USA Services (one of 24 Presidential E-Gov initiatives) and is responsible for one of the 17 key measures tracked by GSA. USA Services’ mission is to help make the government more citizen-centric by providing citizens with easy access to accurate, consistent, and timely government information. OCSC provides citizens direct information about and from all levels of their government through an array of integrated information channels, including USA.gov (the U.S. government’s official Web portal) telephone and e-mail inquiry response from the National Contact Center (NCC), and print materials distributed from Pueblo, CO. USA Services is also responsible for helping agencies government-wide improve their interactions with citizens. Through USA Services’ national network of state and local officials, they are expanding GSA and USA Services’ outreach to other governments. USA Services is also working closely with state and local officials to use GSA schedules to acquire IT products and services when their jurisdictions have been deemed a disaster area. It also provides agencies with easy and cost-effective access to contact center services through the FirstContact contract and soon the USA Contact contract will include Web hosting and professional services through the Web Solutions contract.
The paragraphs below summarize major performance results during FY 2007.
Performance Highlights
USA Services achieved the rating of “effective” in the OMB PART process. In FY 2007, USA Services completed the first quarterly scheduled comprehensive, independent evaluation of USA Services.
The paragraphs below summarize OCSC USA Services’ major performance results during FY 2007.
- Achieved 222 million citizen touch points, an increase of 67 percent over the 133 million in FY 2006, by providing accurate, consistent, and timely information to citizens through a variety of channels in both English and Spanish. These include online information via USA.gov (the official portal of the U.S. government), telephone response via 1-800 FED INFO, email, and print publications from Pueblo, CO.
- To improve name recognition, OCSC revised the name and redesigned the site to USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov. In January 2007, after a great deal of market research and analysis on the name recognition of FirstGov.gov and FirstGov en Espanol, and testing of alternate names, OCSC renamed the portals USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov. USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov (“gobierno” is Spanish for “government”) very clearly speaks to what the sites are—the official Web portal of the U.S. government, in both English and Spanish. Both USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov follow the naming conventions of most other national portals. The name changes have been extremely successful, and traffic to both sites has continued to increase since the name changes. In April 2007, USA Services launched redesigns of USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov, which resulted from usability testing with citizens, analyses of Web metrics and survey data, and Web best practices. Making the site more citizen-centric, USA Services reduced the clutter on each page, made content and image changes requested by the public, added new features to change the text size when the site is viewed, and strengthened the branding and recognition of the site as the official U.S. government Web portal.
- Brown University once again designated USA.gov as the #1 Web site in the Federal government. The United Nations also rated FirstGov.gov as the #1 Web site for quality and e-government readiness. In July 2007, Time magazine named USA.gov among the “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without.”
- OCSC continued to expand the capabilities of USASearch.gov. Visitors can now search for government news from over 190 agency Web feeds as well as approximately 60,000 images contained in government image libraries. Additional robust search features allow the citizen to search for weather at specific locations, search for specific automobiles, and get results from many government sources on crash test ratings and fuel estimates. In addition, search results now include results for frequently asked questions from 26 agencies.
- USA Services continued to provide telecommunications and interactive voice response (IVR) support to the Department of State’s National Passport Information Center (NPIC). Due to new requirements that passports were needed to travel by air outside of the country, call volumes at the NPIC increased by more than 340 percent in FY 2007 as compared to the same period in FY 2006. USA Services worked closely with NPIC to provide additional telecommunications capacity and to make the IVR call flow more efficient to handle increased volumes of callers. Additionally, during the summer of FY 2007, NPIC requested that the NCC provide direct telephone support in answering the volume of calls. From June through its completion in September, USA Services handled 240,000 passport calls.
- OCSC provided training for 3,400 Web managers from 75 Federal agencies and 25 state and local agencies in 37 courses, workshops, and Webinars on Web best practices through Web Manager University
- Since FY 1997, USA Services has published the annual Consumer Action Handbook, a how-to guide for citizens to use to protect themselves in the marketplace, before, during, and after a consumer purchase or transaction. The Handbook has consistently been the most popular publication listed in the Consumer Information Catalog, and consumer protection officials across the country refer to it as the gold standard for Federal publications. In response to the needs of the large and growing Hispanic population, in FY 2007 USA Services produced the first annual edition of the Guia del Consumidor and distributed copies to organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions serving the Spanish-speaking community, as well as to individuals.
The following section presents the OCSC performance by GSA strategic goals.