In terms of customer experience, anyone who has traveled abroad can recall the experience of customs. Positive or negative, everyone has a story.
At U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), physically expediting the historically slow process of moving people and goods through customs is a customer service goal.
That can be a tricky business, as CBP officers try to create an easy, efficient experience for travelers while looking for offenders.
“I…
read tomorrow
In terms of customer experience, anyone who has traveled abroad can recall the experience of customs. Positive or negative, everyone has a story.
At U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), physically expediting the historically slow process of moving people and goods through customs is a customer service goal.
That can be a tricky business, as CBP officers try to create an easy, efficient experience for travelers while looking for offenders.
“I think most of the traveling public is what we identify as compliant. So we do have our mindset first as we are looking to simplify our operations to be able to quickly identify people we do need to interact with and Let others pass as quickly as possible,” said Jody Hardin, executive director of planning, project analysis and evaluation at CBP Federal Monthly Insights – Customer Experience.
New technologies that CBP has adopted over the past few years have helped significantly speed up the customer experience at both entry and exit points. The Post-9/11 Global Entry Trusted Traveler Program, recently followed up by CBP One, offers frequent travelers the opportunity to complete screening early. Now, biometric entry and exit procedures provide a route to contactless entry. However, it hit some snags when it launched. Originally designed to use fingerprints to identify travelers, CBP found the process cumbersome.
“We worked very closely together on how to simplify this process, but basically hit a roadblock in our evacuation mission because we didn’t have the infrastructure to capture the fingerprints of everyone leaving the United States,” Harding said in a statement. Commonwealth Avenue with Tom Temin.
In facial recognition software, CBP found a solution to the problem. Working with private partners and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CBP has developed a program called Traveler Verification Services (TVS) that uses a photo, such as a driver’s license or passport, and compares it to existing images of individuals to Verify identidy.
“We found that face comparison technology was actually the best way to be able to match assets that we already had, we captured information on these people as they came in, and were able to quickly match their faces to the documents they submitted,” Hardin said. .
After the White House issued an executive order directing agencies designated as High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs) to improve their customer-facing services, CBP pushed for a more technical and simplified customer service. CBP’s umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security, was identified as one of the HISP agencies.
“The head of each HISP shall, in consultation with the Deputy Director of OMB Management, designate a limited number of services each year for priority improvement,” the order was issued late last year.
Hardin said CBP plans to move more and more immigration paperwork to the mobile app, and its mission is to continuously improve customer service. Currently, the CBP One app allows both private and business paperwork to be submitted on the mobile app. This includes Form I-94, which must be completed by everyone entering or leaving the United States except for U.S. citizens, returning foreign visitors, foreign visitors on immigrant visas, and most Canadian citizens.
“This capability actually requires that people at the land border have to apply for an I-94 permit to show when they entered the U.S. We have a web-based version that can be applied in advance,” Hardin said. “When we saw it and decided When we modernized it and put it into a mobile app, we saw huge results that we didn’t actually expect.”