GovernmentExecutive.com

For the first time ever, Uncle Sam has edged out the private sector in overall levels of customer satisfaction, according to a report released today.

The federal government notched a score of 71.0 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in 2001, up from 68.6 in 2000 and 1999. Private sector service companies averaged 70.5 on the ACSI scale, down from 71.2 last year. The ACSI index grades business and agencies with a numerical score from 0 to 100 based on customer expectations, perceived quality and perceived value.

Survey officials cautioned that the government might not yet be as customer-friendly as the private sector, since federal participation in the survey is voluntary, while private firms are selected by the University of Michigan Business School's National Quality Research Center, which conducts the survey. Still, the federal showing achieves a key objective of the Clinton administration's National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR).

"These comparative scores means we have accomplished the first goal on that path, which is to make government service as good as the private sector," said former NPR director Morley Winograd, now a professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall Business School. "I think it is a remarkable accomplishment for the federal government's employees, both leaders and line workers."

The 2001 survey contains the broadest look at federal customer service to date. Thirty-nine agencies selected 53 customer groups to be measured. Twenty-nine agencies were first-time participants, meaning just 10 of the 30 agencies NPR rounded up for the 1999 and 2000 surveys agreed to participate in this year's study. Despite this turnover, the 2001 survey is comparable to earlier tallies because the survey is weighted by how much the programs surveyed consume of each agency's overall budget, and the 10 holdovers - including the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration - measured customer satisfaction with programs that claim most of their budgets.

Of the agencies that had been surveyed before, only the Social Security Administration experienced any decline in customer satisfaction ratings this year: Satisfaction among recipients of retirement benefits slipped from 84 to 82 on the index. The IRS gained nearly 11 percentage points in its rating from individual tax filers, fueled largely by high rates of satisfaction among taxpayers who filed electronically. Top performers among first-time participants included the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration, which surveyed parents of Job Corps participants, and the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which surveyed flower importers.

Agencies that surveyed users of their Web sites and public data scored well, according to Claes Fornell, director of the National Quality Research Center and inventor of the ACSI. For example, the Education Department's Office of Student Financial Assistance received a satisfaction rating of 82 from users of its Web site. The General Services Administration did not participate in the survey, so users of FirstGov, the government's one-stop search engine, could not provide feedback on the site.

Poor performers included the Board of Veterans Appeals, which received a satisfaction rating of 35, the lowest score in the survey's history. But this rating reflects the fact that the people surveyed are appealing agency decisions that went against them, a customer group that by definition is hard to please, according to Fornell.

"It is a tough decision for the [Board of Veterans Appeals] to actually survey those people who are most likely to be unhappy," he said. "These claimants have already received a negative decision."

Critics of the survey have long argued that some agencies survey easy-to-please customers or customers with little relation to their mission in order to pad their ratings. In 1999 and 2000, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency surveyed reference librarians who used the EPA Web site. The EPA did not participate this year.

In general, Fornell said newcomers to the survey made a "pretty honest attempt" to tally the opinion of their primary customers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration surveyed employees at firms that had experienced an OSHA walk-through, and the Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency surveyed recipients of direct farm loans.

Under the Bush administration, management of the federal sector survey is handled by the Federal Consulting Group, a Treasury Department unit. The group helped recruit participants in this year's survey, and will try to add more agencies to next year's, including some agencies that participated in 1999 and 2000 but sat out this year. Federal Consulting Group officials have met with the Office of Management and Budget to drum up support for the customer survey, which was not mentioned in the President's Management Agenda released this fall.

"Hopefully OMB will continue to support the use of agency funds both for the survey itself and for the efforts that will need to be made to continue the progress the government has clearly been making," Winograd said.

2001 Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

Source: Federal Consulting Group; National Quality Research Center, University of Michigan Business School