Citizens demand satisfaction

The American Customer Satisfaction Index

The cutting-edge features of some private-sector Web sites are fueling high expectations among users, and federal agencies must keep pace with the satisfaction demands of citizens who visit government sites, experts say.

The latest quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) results, released last month, show the public's experience with government Web sites to be close to that with industry sites in terms of satisfaction.

But despite an overall 5.4 percent increase in user satisfaction compared to results from a year ago, satisfaction with many federal Web sites decreased since the last quarter. Forty-one percent of the 54 sites ACSI measured showed negative change, while 33 percent increased in rank and 17 percent remained steady. The remaining 9 percent represents Web sites that were not measured in the previous quarter. Sampled sites ranged from the FirstGov portal to the State Department's French-language Web page for the Belgian embassy.

Users gave federal sites a satisfaction score of 71.2 on a scale of 0 to 100; the overall satisfaction rate for private-sector sites is 74.4, according to ACSI numbers released in September. The quarterly index is produced with the University of Michigan, the American Society for Quality, the CFI Group and ForeSee Results Inc.

Government Web pages that saw a drop in their satisfaction scores have not made changes over time, according to Larry Freed, ForeSee Results' chief executive officer. "If you don't improve [the site] over time, citizens will start to downgrade you," he said. "Citizen expectations of the online experience don't stand still."

The Government Accountability Office's revamped home page earned a score of 71 — a 6 percent gain and one of the biggest increases this quarter. But the satisfaction scores for FirstGov and its Spanish-

language version, FirstGov en Español, both dropped — approximately 3 percent and 4 percent to 70 points and 74 points,

respectively.

"These scores don't worry us because they're still high," said Beverly Godwin, FirstGov director. Switching to an automated content management system prevented officials from adding new content and repairing links during the time period measured by the ACSI poll. "We knew [our score] was going to go down," she said, adding that officials expect next quarter's satisfaction results to be higher.

Search engines, navigation and functionality offer the biggest opportunities for improvement, said Ron Oberbillig, director of performance measures for the Federal Consulting Group, a franchise of the Treasury Department. He helps agency officials that are interested in improving customer satisfaction by using the ACSI survey. "That's where we typically see the lowest scores and the highest impact in terms of citizen satisfaction."

Improving sites so agencies can get higher satisfaction scores will require funding, said Anne Kelly, director and chief executive officer of the Federal Consulting Group.

As agency officials realize they can save money by shifting communication strategies from costly call centers and walk-in help desks to Web-based services, improving sites will be a requirement, said Bernie Lubran, program manager for Performance Measurement Tools and Diagnostic Services at the Federal Consulting Group.

Federal "Web sites must be competitive with the Amazon.coms," he said. "It's not just simply 'good enough for government' anymore."