Federal Agencies Rank Dead Last in Forrester Customer Experience Index

Improving service delivery and customer experience across the federal government has been a priority for both the Trump and Obama administrations, but the concerted effort doesn’t appear to be making customers happier.

In the 2019 U.S. Customer Experience Index published by Forrester Wednesday, federal agencies ranked dead last among 16 industries. The government got an average score of 59 percent, within a percentage point of the same score it has received over the past two years.

Forrester compiled the index from polling online more than 101,000 Americans ages 18 to 88 who interacted in the past year with at least one of 260 U.S. brands across 16 industries. The index attempts to measure the ease, effectiveness and emotion elicited from the interaction and rates the brands on a scale of 1 to 100. Comparatively, across all industries, including airlines, automakers, credit card providers and insurers, the overall U.S. customer experience increased slightly by 0.4 points to 70.2.

As they have in the past, federal agencies measured in the index comprised several of the worst overall brand scores, with USAJobs.Gov—the federal government’s jobs portal—scoring an index-worst 46.5.

Other poor scorers falling in the lowest scoring metric—“very poor,” or scores lower than 55—include Healthcare.Gov, the IRS and Education Department.

Conversely, as it has for the past several years, the National Park Service captured the highest score among federal agencies with a 73.8, though that dropped three points from last year. NPS was the only federal agency to score about the overall industry average, and the U.S. Postal Service, Tricare, Medicare and Veterans Affairs Department rounded out the top five agency scores.

The report states 81% of brands “stagnated” or held similar scores to last year, while 14% rose and 5% declined.