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Back in March, we shared about the work we were doing to develop BEARS, the Benefits Eligibility Awareness Resource Service. USAGov’s new online locator tool helps people find government benefits and services geared to major life events. It officially launched in early August, and we wanted to give you an update.

For more than a dozen years, government employees have used the Go.USA.gov URL shortening service to turn long government and military URLs into more manageable short URLs.

Our mission at USAGov and USAGov en Español is to make it easy for anyone to find and understand the government information they need. In 2021, we connected with the public 117 million times through our websites, social media, email, and phone and chat contact center support.

Connecting people with the federal services they need is the focus of the USAGov program. We get a lot of traffic on USA.gov and USAGov en Español, and a lot of questions at our call center and on social media about government benefits, grants, and loans. People are eager for help with bills, housing, and food assistance. 

Finding contact information for a federal department or agency is a top task at USA.gov and USAGov en Español. Our A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies directory is a popular feature and the result of many years of user testing and website user metrics. 

User data guides what we do at USAGov. Without it, we wouldn’t know what government questions people are searching for. And we wouldn’t know how to design our content to make it easier for people to find and understand the answers.

USAGov receives and responds to questions directly from the public in many ways: through social media, on page surveys on USA.gov and USAGov en Español, and through chats and calls. One powerful tool in the USAGov toolbelt is our interactive voice response (IVR) system in both English and Spanish through the USAGov Contact Center.

During the coronavirus pandemic, government websites are working to make their COVID-19-related content easier for people to find in search engine results. They’re doing it by using SpecialAnnouncement schema.org tags.

Visit this blog post from Digital.gov to get a clear explanation of how these tags work, and find out what USA.gov is learning by using them.

A significant part of USAGov’s work is to answer the public’s questions about government through our USAGov Contact Center. In 2019, we received more than 430,000 calls. Our agents answered many requests for other agencies’ phone numbers and questions about the status of applications, payments, or personal information. We believed that we could answer these requests more efficiently by expanding our use of interactive voice response (IVR). An IVR is an automated system that routes callers on a phone tree, based on their voice responses or pressing a specific button on their phone keypad.

Earlier this year, we piloted our USAGov chatbot to help visitors find answers to their questions about scams and fraud. After the launch, we made tweaks to the interface based on customer feedback and usage data.