# Presentation: 469421

## Lessons Learned,Challenges FacedUSDA/Food Safety & Inspection Servicewww.fsis.usda.gov

- Janet B. Stevens, PMP
*Director,* Web Services
- Food Safety & Inspection Service/USDA
*Janet.Stevens@fsis.usda.gov*

## About FSIS

- USDA’s public health agency responsible for ensuring that the nation's commercial supply of **meat, poultry, and egg products** is safe, wholesome, and correctly labeled and packaged.
- Examples of foods we **do not regulate** (unless there’s a percentage of meat/egg product in them):
- Vegetables
- Fruits
- Seafood
- Mostly non-meat containing products, like peanut butter

## Who’s Involved in Your Pizza

**Notes:**
According to GAO, the safety and quality of the U.S. food supply is:
Administered by 15 Federal agencies through regulations and policies
Regulated and enforced through about 70 interagency agreements
Supplemented by the states, which have their own statutes, regulations, and agencies.

## Major Lesson Learned: Mission

**Challenges**
- Some customers **know your mission very well** and know what they want to find
- Some customers **have no idea what your mission is and don’t want to**, they just want information from their government NOW and sometimes think you’re hiding it or your site is bad because they can’t find it
**We have to serve both** with current resources without making the site hard to use

## Lessons Learned: Search/Navigation

**Challenge: **Search and navigation scores are consistently the lowest performing elements in our customer satisfaction survey. Why?
***Approach 1:***** Think traditionally**
- Review what they tell us they’re looking for that are part of our mission. Improve search and navigation.
***Approach 2:***** Think nontraditionally**
- Review what they tell us they’re looking for regardless if it’s part of our mission. Improve search and navigation.

## What We Did

**Reviewed survey comments/search terms**
- Noticed patterns that customers **were looking for food safety information/recalls** outside our mission area that they would **never find**
**Decision made** with sr. management approval to add links to FDA’s:
- Major recalls page to our front door
- Recall page in our A-Z index
- Recall information on our Recall page

## Pattern of Responses

- What additional **content** related to the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products would you like to see?
- 2007-03-20: All Recalls, like the **Pet Recalls**.
- 2007-03-17: Information on how to tell if a product is from a **cloned animal**.
- 2007-02-23: I would like to see **fruits**.
- 2007-02-20: **Fish and shellfish**.
- 2007-02-07: Links to **fish safety**.
- 2007-02-03: Make the search options work properly. For example if you enter a search term it may give you 100's of results, none of which you were searching for.
- 2007-02-01: Safety of fresh products (handling, storing, etc. of **fruit and vegetables**)
- 2006-02-01: **Produce** recalls and **seafood** recalls

## Handling the Food Recalls

- After the **spinach recall** hit in Sept. 2006, **satisfaction dropped 3 points**.
- Comments we received:
- 2006-09-18: This site should contain info on vegetable & fruit safety issues, in my opinion...food is food & I need the global information!
- 2006-09-18: List of Calif dept of health phone numbers.
- 2006-09-18: Safe cooking of vegetables especially Spinach! **Why are you hiding this?**
- This was a **trust** in Government information issue

## Featuring FDA Recalls & Terms

- Cloning
- Fruits & Vegetables (and Vegetables & Fruits)
- Pet food
- Products
- Seafood

**A-Z Index**

**Search**

## Meeting Customer Needs When Events Occur...

- Feb. 14 Peanut Butter FDA recall for salmonella (Consumer audience focus)
- Peanut butter recall generated **60+ phone calls** to the Meat & Poultry hotline **the first day**
- Comparing Feb. 7-10 with 14-17:
- Front door only up 1.76%, but...
- Recalls page up 126%
**Salmonella Q&A page up 1,463%**
- Put link on front door and recalls page to FDA page
- Added item to A-Z Index with link to FDA page
- Same process as for spinach (FDA) recall from Sept. 2006

## Featuring The Recent PB Recall

**      ****Front door    ****	****	****          Recalls landing page**

## Satisfaction Survey Lessons Learned

- Used to:
- Benchmark success or failure of site or services
- Segment visitors
- Develop custom questions to have deeper dives into understanding our customers’ needs
- Help determine success of media campaigns (BeFoodSafe.gov)
- Set performance goals
- Supplement WebTrends for analytics

## Other Lessons Learned

**Review analytics and data**
- Discuss trends and results with subject matter experts inside and outside the staff
**Leave your office**
- Everyone’s a current or potential customer
**Be a champion/maven**
- Set goals and promote successes with sr. management, customers and employees
- 2007-04-12: “Satisfied with set up and information. This a job well done!”
- 2007-04-01: “Your links of every thing that I wanted to see covered all. So nothing that can think of is missing or need more of. I appreciate all the support and help.”
**Ask for what you need** and show why data supports it
**You** support an important mission! It deserves attention and resources!
- 2007-03-25: “I just would like to see this site continue to make the public aware of the recalls of food products due to the fact that this could **save many peoples lives**.”

## Outcomes & Successes

**Current State**
- Satisfaction scores rose to our all-time high of 74
- Top-rated site in USDA
**Ask Karen** (6,500+ visitors/month)
- Natural language query virtual representative
- Supports current M-F, 8 hrs/day Meat & Poultry Hotline
- Positive media reporting (annual article in *Wash. Post* since ’04)
- Positive customer feedback: 94% find it useful
**Email subscription service** (32,000 subscribers; nearly 11M alerts sent)
- Satisfaction score: 34% rate it a perfect “10”
- Media, school systems & health providers are prominent subscribers

## The Future

**Short-term**
- Automating frequently asked questions
**Long-term**
- Web 2.0
- Social networking
- Avatar sites
- Data mash-ups
- Mobile device maturity
- Much more!