Great news from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Index today: an all-time high. In fact, the highest score in six years of measurement and the biggest quarter-over-quarter increase ever.
Download the full, free report here.
So, to what do I attribute the increase?
1) We are almost a year into the most tech-savvy presidency in history. At times, it has seemed to me that President Obama has struggled to find footing with social media recommendations that could confuse priorities and shift attention away from the core business of e-government: communication information via the web. But I think this study is pretty convincing evidence that as he settles into his stride, his leadership is improving e-gov. The score didn't go up just a little bit. It went up 2% and almost 2 points to 75.2. This represents almost 300,000 citizen surveys, so an increase of two points and 2% is significant.
2) We did some analysis and found the longer a federal website has been measuring satisfaction, the bigger the improvements, over both the long term and short term. Those that have been measuring 5 or more years had the biggest increases, followed by those who have been measuring for four years, and so on. After all, you can't manage what you can't measure. So while the Obama administration deserves some of the credit, the truth is that the sites with the biggest increases have been watching these issues for YEARS, long before President Obama was even elected to national office. Federal web managers have been working HARD on this stuff, and there is a core group running e-gov that is really committed to listening to Voice of Citizen. They are committed to using e-gov to better serve the citizenry, and they can't do that without understanding what citizens want and need from their government online.
It's an exciting time for e-gov. While we will doubtless see ups and downs over the next quarters, satisfaction overall has been on the upswing, even outperforming some private sector industries. E-gov is one of the things that the federal government seems to be doing really well for the most part. There is always room for improvement, especially if expectations continue to increase. But there are a lot of individual sites doing very, very well.