CX at Consular Affairs

Improving services for U.S. citizens, travelers, and immigrants

Year: 2024 – 2025
Partner: State Department
Team: GSA TTS
Role: Service Designer, Program Strategist
Sector: Federal government
Press: Office of the Spokesperson

Background

The Bureau of Consular Affairs plays a vital role in serving U.S. citizens abroad, whether it’s issuing passports, providing emergency assistance, or helping foreign nationals connect with the U.S. With 160 million valid passports in circulation and nearly half of all U.S. citizens holding one, demand for consular services is higher than ever. In addition, recent federal policies that increase CX, UX, security and governance standards required a cross-Bureau coordinating effort. How might we build a new CX function within Consular Affairs to respond to new digital-first policies and coordinate cross-Bureau service improvements?

Approach

To better serve the public, Consular Affairs partnered with GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) to establish a dedicated customer experience and service design function focused on improving service delivery and streamlining access to essential information. Our team helped design the organization’s structure, governance, and operational strategy, ensuring it aligned with M-23-22, the White House directive on improving public services.

Formation
Early phase of the work to define new CX team’s overall goals, landscape, and operating model.
How I contributed:
  • Supported new CX org design and role definition
  • Analyzed recent policy documents that impacted Consular Affairs services
  • Reviewed existing State Department handbooks to understand how past policies have been implemented
  • Stood up working group to support roadmap planning
Discovery
Once CX team’s goals were defined, I focused on a discovery phase that helped to identify opportunities.
How I contributed:
  • Conversations with stakeholders across the primary Consular Affairs services to identify opportunities in relation to recent digital-first policy
  • Synthesized learnings with working group
  • Created roadmap of targeted efforts and goals
Design
The primary outputs for my effort were tools that moved forward on implementing new digital-first policies.
How I contributed:
  • Helped scope CX projects across the four primary services
  • Created design operations tools to support consistent research operations
  • Created digital-first maturity tools to assess progress toward policy goals
  • Created CA service and product catalog
Implementation
The outputs were tested with smaller teams before refined and operationalized across Consular Affairs.
How I contributed:
  • Tested research operations and maturity tools with various teams
  • Supported the creation of sharepoint for sharing standards across State Department
  • Documented progress and ongoing reporting with leadership
Methods and insights

Mapping the State Department policy and organizational capacity landscape

To inform program strategy, the team led a number of efforts to understand the current state of CX and service delivery at State Department to better understand where the new function could provide the most value, and in what ways. One of the methods for doing this was to lay out principles that defined good service delivery such as accessibility, security, usability, design, content, and map the existing policies that promote those principles to them as well as how the primary State Department services map to those principles. The result allowed us to both map the nuanced policy landscape, break down the goals of those policies, clarify the services we hoped to improve, and understand who in the broad agency environment was supporting those efforts.

Setting up empowered service delivery teams

The program strategy was designed in such a way to have a dedicated service delivery lead for each of the primary State Department Consular Affairs services that could both gain trust with the implementing civil servants in each of the services, but also could build a more robust understanding of the problem and service space in order to navigate improvements that were often complex in nature and had diverse stakeholder landscapes.

Building State-specific design and research operational tools

To support those dedicated service delivery leads and their teams, we built up a robust set of design and research operations tools that were Consular Affairs specific and recognized the unique agency culture we were operating within. These tools included research clearance and compensation support, research design and data collection protocols, reporting templates, stakeholder management support, and project planning tools that all came together to support quicker and more efficient service improvement efforts.

What we accomplished

We helped to formalize a new dedicated CX organization, workstream teams, and research and design operational tools within Consular Affairs that allowed the Bureau to be more responsive to policies, service improvements, and set the standard for digital-first delivery.

Impact

Standing up this CX organization wasn’t just about new processes, it was about shifting how Consular Affairs approaches service delivery.

With a centralized CX function, data-driven insights, and a culture of continuous improvement, CA is now positioned to deliver faster, clearer, and more user-friendly services to millions of people every year. We established a new CX organization that drove continuous service improvements, including 20 scoped efforts to enhance experiences for millions of U.S. citizens relying on consular services worldwide, developed a Consular Affairs service and product catalog to streamline planning, coordination, and delivery, launched an accessible Consular Affairs adaptation of the U.S. Web Design System, ensuring consistent, user-centered design across digital services and product, and created 10+ research and design operations tools to accelerate and standardize service improvement efforts.

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