The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is gathering customer experience (CX) feedback through its recent expansion of WorkwithUSAID.gov, which is a free resource hub that helps organizations learn what USAID does and navigate how to partner with the agency.
Ruth Buckley, the deputy assistant administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Management, said on June 6 that the website gathers feedback from organizations that USAID works with to deliver assistance to program participants.
The agency doesn’t necessarily consider the program participants themselves to be customers, “though we do treat them in a similar way,” according to Buckley.
“We’ve really latched on to technology with a new platform called WorkwithUSAID.gov, where we are trying to make it easier for implementing partners to partner with us,” Buckley said at Carahsoft’s Government Customer Experience & Engagement Summit. “We’ve translated it into four or five different languages. As we get more money, we’re continuing the translations.”
The agency announced in late March that the website is now available in Spanish and French, expanding accessibility to the website’s resources for new and potential partner organizations in more of the countries where USAID works. The agency recently expanded the platform into Arabic as well.
The Work with USAID platform first launched in November 2021. As of March 2024, USAID said over 6,300 global organizations have registered on the website – 67 percent of which are local partners.
“There are all kinds of tools in there and videos and how-tos to basically [explain] how do you handle the Federal procurement regulations, how do you get a UEI [Unique Entity Identifier] registration, and things like that – none of which are easy,” Buckley explained. “And some of them require that you go to antiquated legacy systems that don’t work very well and are not user-friendly.”
“So, that’s been one of our big, big innovations. And not only are we getting positive feedback on that, but we’re also using it as a tool to get more feedback on what else do we need to do,” she added. “And so, what we’re trying to do is very much data-centric, but we’re also people-centric.”
