U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is a designated High Impact Service Provider (HISP), accounting for the scale and critical nature of our public-facing services. As a HISP, and as part of our commitment to providing streamlined experiences to our stakeholders, we conduct comprehensive assessments of our high-impact services, measure their customer experience maturity, and identify actions to improve service delivery.
Vessel Entrance and Clearance
Each day, vessels arrive by sea to the U.S. carrying billions of dollars of consumer goods. Every vessel that arrives must go through the vessel entrance and clearance (VEC) process to ensure that goods and people are entering and leaving the U.S. in compliance with CBP. The process touches numerous stakeholders, both commercial and government:
- Vessels – the ship’s captain and crew must document and declare everything on board.
- Vessel agents – U.S.-based individuals and companies help vessels coordinate arrival and clearance with CBP.
- VEC specialist – An individual from CBP responsible for processing vessel entrance and clearance forms.
- CBP officers – Officers who conduct on-vessel law enforcement activities. They are sometimes also responsible for processing vessel entrance and clearance forms.
Because of the size and scale of the process, and its important role in trade, CBP is committed to improving and streamlining the experience. The original process required extensive coordination between vessels, vessel agents, and CBP. As a paper-based process, it had a high potential for human error and poses heavy administrative and mental burdens for CBP customers and employees.
The new Vessel Entrance and Clearance System (VECS) digitizes and automates vessel entrance and clearance, streamlining the process.
VECS Experience
The application development process for VECS was rooted in human-centered design. The application owner, a former CBP officer, prioritized officer experience and vessel agent experience with the following design principles:
- Simplify: Create an easy-to-use, streamlined, digital vessel entrance and clearance process, reduce redundancy at each step, and eliminate opportunities for error, confusion, and delay.
- Standardize: Standardize business operations and procedures to improve the customer experience and increase voluntary compliance.
- Empower: Provide users with the tools and information they need to carry out their missions efficiently.
- Alleviate: Lessen or eliminate the physical, mental, financial, and procedural burdens placed on CBP personnel and customers.
The application’s design was developed with direct input from CBP officers, VEC specialists, and Vessel agents. As the VECS pilot was deployed across the country, users had a chance to get hands on experience and move through the actual VECS process and provide feedback in real time.
As a best practice and in accordance with our customer experience action plan, as the application was rolled out, the CBP Experience team worked to document the user journey for the paper-based vessel entrance and clearance process, and the digital VECS journey.
Journey maps document the user experience and help identify pain points, opportunities, and impact. To develop the journey maps for VECS, the CBP Experience (CBPX) team conducted research:
- Observational: Field visits to the port to observe the process and collect real life insights
- Qualitative: Stakeholder interviews to understand the experience and sentiments of users for the current state and future state processes
- Quantitative: Surveys to record the time it takes to complete different steps in the paper based and digital process
When learning about VECS, future VECS users shared feedback such as, “This will bring CBP into the 21st century,” and “This will allow me to focus more on enforcement activities and less shuffling paperwork.” A Savannah Vessel Agent said to his peer, “This is going to give me back so much time to spend with my family.” The older Agent responded, “You’re going to get moments with your daughter that I missed with mine.”
All of this came together to tell the story of the VECS user journey and showcase the impact the VECS application would have on CBP and Vessel agents. The improved VECS experience would amount to:
- 300K hours/year saved for CBP & VEC specialists
- $10.7M saved in CBP & VEC specialist personnel hours
- 500K hours/year saved for vessel agents
- $27.4M saved in vessel agent personnel hours
- $46K saved in local storage and transportation costs/year
- Time returned to CBP’s mission
Looking ahead
As CBP Experience embarked on our journey to elevate the way we engage the public so that we can return time to the mission and reduce administrative burden, we identified pockets of experience excellence across CBP, including in the VECS program, that we are currently documenting, applying, and scaling across other mission areas.
A focus on experience has helped us to build trust with our stakeholders, reduce the amount of time people spend filling out forms or doing redundant and manual tasks, and return time to mission critical tasks. As part of our fiscal year 2024 Customer Experience commitments, we are focused on improving the Global Entry and Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) experiences.
If you would like more information about VECS, please go to https://cbp.gov/VECS.