New Customer Experience Directorate has reduced public burden by 21 million+ hours in 2023 and improved delivery of Department’s services, resources and support

WASHINGTON – Following the second anniversary of President Biden’s Executive Order 14058 “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized significant strides toward improving customer experience (CX) and reducing the administrative burden on the American public in 2023 and pledged to build upon those improvements in 2024.

“More Americans interact with the Department of Homeland Security every day than with any other Department in the federal government, and our personnel are focused on ensuring our services, resources, and support are easily and readily accessible. That is why we established an office dedicated to improving customer experience,” said Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “We have made significant progress in modernizing our delivery of services through the use of new technologies and the talent, ingenuity, and dedication of our extraordinary personnel. Looking ahead, we will continue to improve the customer experience for the millions of individuals with whom we interact every day, while advancing equity, protecting individuals’ privacy rights and civil liberties, and increasing our openness, transparency, and accountability.”

In addition to announcing the permanent Customer Experience Directorate in September 2023, the DHS workforce has improved CX and reduced public burden in a variety of ways, including:

• Saving Customers’ Time: Forms to request services and benefits are getting faster and easier to use across DHS. The Department reduced public burden by 21,425,258 hours, exceeding its 20-million-hour goal, by making forms fully digital, pre-populating fields, and eliminating unnecessary fields.
• Making Services More Accessible for Customers: Most people applying for immigration benefits with USCIS can now go online to update addresses, reschedule biometric appointments, and track personalized processing times on select forms, eliminating the need to call in or fill out a paper form to take care of most basic tasks.
• Focusing on Disaster Survivors’ Specific Needs: Disaster survivors will have a faster, easier, and more streamlined digital way of applying for individual assistance at disasterassistance.gov. FEMA used customer feedback and user research to improve and redesign registration and intake processes, requiring disaster survivors to provide only information relevant to their individual needs.
• Streamlining Immigration Obligations: Noncitizens in immigration proceedings can now use the ICE Portal, a central, online way to manage and track their responsibilities, such as scheduling appointments, updating their addresses, and checking immigration court hearing information.
• Improving Travelers’ Experiences: TSA’s implementation of new identity verification technology for PreCheck^® passengers in 28 airports speeds up checkpoints while ensuring security.
• Automating Key Points in the Supply Chain: Vessel agents and ship operators will free up time using U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s transformed vessel entry and clearance process, which is now digital.  A transaction that used to take hours will now take just a few minutes and can be completed almost entirely online, when the system is fully deployed nationwide in FY 2024.
• Validating Improvements: This past spring, over 13,000 passengers in airports across the U.S. gave TSA feedback on its services, and the results measured high satisfaction with their experiences on the day they took the survey.
  • 93 percent overall Customer Satisfaction score.
  • 95 percent of passengers surveyed reported that interactions with officers were professional and respectful during the screening process.
  • 94 percent of passengers reported confidence in the ability of officers to keep air travel safe.
  • 91 percent of passengers experienced reasonable wait times with 89 percent waiting less than 15 minutes at their checkpoint.
  • 78 percent of passengers reported experiencing no challenges at their checkpoint.
• Embedding CX throughout the Department: DHS has hired more than 70 CX professionals, who are working across components to build and scale CX capacity.

The Customer Experience Directorate is in the Office of the Chief Information Officer to further advance CX as a Department-wide priority.

“Our workforce places customers at the center of everything we do,” said DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen. “I am proud of the work our Customer Experience professionals do across the Department as we continue to implement President Biden’s customer experience vision.”

Earlier this year, DHS published its Burden Reduction Plan for FY24, which outlines the Department’s goal of eliminating an additional 10 million hours of public burden by September 30, 2024. Additionally, Secretary Mayorkas has tasked each Component with creating its own burden reduction strategies. All of these priorities are part of the new DHS IT Strategic Plan for 2024-2028, which includes a strategic goal of improving customer experience and transforming the delivery of DHS services.

To learn more about the Department’s progress to improve customer experience, please visit DHS’s CX website.

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