Lessons Learned, Challenges Faced USDAFood Safety

1
Lessons Learned,Challenges FacedUSDA/Food
Safety Inspection Servicewww.fsis.usda.gov

• Janet B. Stevens, PMP
• Director, Web Services
• Food Safety Inspection Service/USDA
• Janet.Stevens_at_fsis.usda.gov

2
About FSIS

• USDAs 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
  theres a percentage of meat/egg product in
  them)
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Seafood
• Mostly non-meat containing products, like peanut
  butter

3
Whos Involved in Your Pizza
4
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 dont want to, they just want information
  from their government NOW and sometimes think
  youre hiding it or your site is bad because they
  cant find it
• We have to serve both with current resources
  without making the site hard to use

5
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 theyre looking for that
  are part of our mission. Improve search and
  navigation.
• Approach 2 Think nontraditionally
• Review what they tell us theyre looking for
  regardless if its part of our mission. Improve
  search and navigation.

6
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 FDAs
• Major recalls page to our front door
• Recall page in our A-Z index
• Recall information on our Recall page

7
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

8
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

9
Featuring FDA Recalls Terms
A-Z Index

• Cloning
• Fruits Vegetables (and Vegetables Fruits)
• Pet food
• Products
• Seafood

Search
10
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 QA 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

11
Featuring The Recent PB Recall
Front door Recalls landing
page
12
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

13
Other Lessons Learned

• Review analytics and data
• Discuss trends and results with subject matter
  experts inside and outside the staff
• Leave your office
• Everyones 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.

14
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

15
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!