FREEDyourMind

Citizen Satisfaction with e-Gov Stays Strong

Strong Satisfaction Scores Continue

Across over 100 Federal Government websites and over 330,000 visitor surveys, satisfaction with Federal Government websites registered a score of 75.1 on a scale of 0-100. While this is slightly off last quarters score of 75.2 (an all-time high), this is not a significant difference.  The fact that citizen satisfaction stayed strong is very good news.

Why does it matter if citizens are satisfied with Federal Government websites?  Is there competition?  If you have a bad experience with the IRS.gov are you going to pay your taxes in Canada?  No.  The traditional way we look at competition doesn't apply to Federal Government websites.  Yet, citizen satisfaction is very important for many reasons.

Channel Competition

One of the main reasons satisfaction with Federal Government websites is important is that the web is one of many channels that citizens can use to get information from the government, perform transactions with the government and communicate with the government.  It is also one of the most efficient ways to accomplish those tasks.  To service the next 10,000 citizens who need information on the Swine Flu from CDC, want to apply for Social Security benefits, get information on Medicare Prescription Drug plans, check out the latest happenings at NASA, investigate our National Parks or do research on a medical condition at Medlineplus, the web provides the most cost effective and efficient way to do so.  Think about trying to accomplish those tasks in a call center or a branch office -- expensive and inefficient.  Citizens will use the channel that provides them the best experience.  So the web is competing with the other channels, we call that Channel Competition.  And the reward for winning the competition?  Lower cost to provide information and services.  A true win-win.  Citizens get more information and services that is more accessible.  And Government is able to provide that information and services at a lower cost.  Which is not only a win for Government but also for us taxpayers.  I guess that makes it a win-win-win.

Highlights

Some highlights from the results include strong scores from many agency websites.  Social Security had two sites that score a 90 on a scale of 0 to 100, the Retirement Estimator (www.ssa.gov/estimator) and Social Security iClaim (www.socialsecruity.gov/applyonline) sites.  These scores are incredible.  To put it in perspective, Amazon and Google scored 86 the last time their ACSI scores were published.  Is Social Security site better than Amazon and Google?  And by better we mean, more functions, better look and feel, more usable, better site performance, etc.  Most experts and everyday citizens would not claim that the Social Security sites are "better" than Amazon and Google, but compared to their expectations they are.  The simple definition of satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect.

In total, 27% of the sites measured scored 80 or higher.  80 is considered the threshold for a top performing site.  Now these sites can not rest on their past success.  As a result of their strong performance and the strong performance of many private sector sites, the standard that visitors will hold these sites to will continue to increase.  And for those sites that were not in the top echelon, they are taking the all important first step to improvement, which is measuring where you are today.  You cannot manage what you do not measure.  

The Satisfied Citizen

We define the satisfied citizen as those citizens who had a satisfaction score of 80 or higher for the e-Gov site they were visiting.  The dissatisfied citizen had a satisfaction of 69 or below.  The impact of satisfying citizens is huge.  The satisfied citizen is 80% more likely to use the the site as a primary resource, 79% more likely to recommend the site to others and 52% more likely to return to the site when compared to a dissatisfied citizen.  The satisfied citizen is also 50% more likely to participate in government and 54% more likely to trust government.

The Full Report

You can find all the details of the report by downloading our commentary on the results or email me and I will send you a copy. 

Social Security Website Better Than Amazon, Google and Netflix!

Wow, what a headline.  And it's true.  At least from user's perspective.  We released the Q4 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index this week and the results were very good. 

Across over 100 Federal Government websites and over 250,000 visitors surveys, satisfaction with Federal Government websites registered a score of 75.2 on a scale of 0-100.  Equaling the highest score ever registered by the ACSI E-Gov Index last quarter.

But more impressive then that was 27% of the sites measured scored 80 or higher with the Social Security Retirement Estimator (www.ssa.gov/estimator) and Social Security iClaim online benefits application(www.socialsecurity.gov/applyonline) both scored 90.  To put that in perspective, in the last published ACSI results covering the e-business and e-commerce sectors included Amazon at 86, Google at 86 and Netflix at 85.

You can download the full report here or email me and I will send you a copy.

So does that mean the Social Security site is better than Amazon's, easier to use than Google's, has more functionality then Netflix?  Not necessarily.  But more importantly it means that visitors to the site are having a better experience and are more satisfied with the experience on the Social Security site.  The site is doing a better job compared to their expectations.

Now, I hear other self proclaimed experts go on and on about what sites are the best based on their personal opinion.  Not to say their opinion is worthless, but it is worth no more than any other site visitor.  In fact, most "experts" are not "normal" visitors.  Listen to your site visitors, measure their satisfaction and know their expectations.

Congratulations to the folks at the Social Security Administration and the rest of the sites that scored 80 and above, the threshold for a great performing site.

Are Healthcare Websites Sick?

As the debate on healthcare continues, we decided to look at the healthcare websites that we measure at ForeSee Results and see how they are meeting the needs of consumers.  You can download the full report here.

Why look at consumer satisfaction of healthcare sites?  Well, as the debate goes on, one thing is certain, healthcare costs a lot of money.  And one way to reduce and manage some of those costs is better use of technology, for example, improving the quality and effectiveness of the healthcare websites.  The web brings us the opportunity of a win-win that is rarely available in other channels.  The first win is providing more information to citizens when they need it, anytime from anywhere you can get to the internet.  More information that is more readily available to consumers is a big win for consumers.  The second win is cost.  By providing more information, be it educational information about symptoms of a disease, potential side effects of a drug, information about the services provide by a hospital or information about deductibles and co-pays of your health insurance, we can lower the cost of providing the information to consumers.  A more informed consumer will make better health care decisions and lower the total cost of the servicing of that consumer.  A win - win!

So, how did the healthcare sites we measured do.  First of all, we surveyed more then  40,000 consumers who visited these healthcare sites in October and we utilized the proven methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) that was founded at The University of Michigan to measure the consumers satisfaction with the websites and how it would impact the consumer's future behavior.  We segmented the sites into four categories and their satisfaction scores are as follows:

• Government Health Information Sites     79
• Pharmaceutical Sites                           78
• Hospital Sites                                      73
• Health Insurance Sites                          64

The aggregate across all sites was 75.  To put these numbers in comparison, we look at 80 as the threshold for a very good site.  On average, the over 700 sites measured everyday by ForeSee Results, resulting in over 1 million completed surveys per month, score a 72, 4% below the healthcare index.  Not bad! 

The sites measured were wide ranging in their success to date, with scores as low as 42 and as high as 86.  86 is the same score that web leaders Amazon and Google obtained in their most recent published ACSI report.  Very impressive results from some of these healthcare sites.

I applaud all the sites (even the ones scoring in the 40's) because the first step to improvement is to measure.  You cannot manage what you do not measure.  And if you don't measure it you won't know if you improved.  So those low scoring sites are at the beginning of a journey that is bound to take them nowhere but up.

So, does satisfaction really matter for these sites?  Well, we talked about the win-win earlier, but lets take another perspective on it.  When we looked across those 40,000 consumers surveyed in October on these healthcare sites, we see that there is huge payback for high satisfaction.  When we look at the consumers who scored 80 or higher and compare them to those that scored 69 or lower, across all the sites, we see that the highly satisfied consumer is:

• 139% more likely to return to the website
• 169% more likely to recommend the website to others
• 153% more likely to use the website as a primary resource for interacting with the healthcare organization

This is truly a huge payback for satisfying your customers and results in the win-win, more information and services at a lower cost.

Satisfaction with E-Gov Hits New High

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.

Latest E-Gov Satisfaction Scores out on Tuesday.

I can't wait to share the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores for e-government due out Tuesday.  The results are remarkable.  We are now three quarters into the new "technology savvy" administration, and it will be interesting to see if this has had any impact on the satisfaction scores. 

This report is useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) We can see the trend in citizen satisfaction with e-government overall. The trend over the last six years is generally up, though the recent trend has been stagnation. Tuesday's report will shed light on whether any of the efforts of the Obama administration have come to fruition in terms of improving citizen satisfaction with e-gov initiatives.

2) We can see how indivdual websites are doing compared to each other, compared to the private sector, and compared to themselves over time. There are 104 individual government websites included in the report from virtually every agency and department. Each website gets a score on a 100-point scale; the higher the better. Anything over 80 is generally considered excellent. Which websites have made the biggest improvements over the last quarter? Over the last year? Which sites are better than Amazon and Google? Which sites aren't doing so well?

3) We can quantify the role of online satisfaction on citizens' likelihood to return to the site, recommend it, even use it as a primary resource. We can do this in aggregate for the federal government overall, and for individual sites.

The data is being compiled and reported as we speak--everyone is busily getting everything together for the release on Tuesday.

This report is useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) We can see the trend in citizen satisfaction with e-government overall. The trend over the last six years is generally up, though the recent trend has been stagnation. Tuesday's report will shed light on whether any of the efforts of the Obama administration have come to fruition in terms of improving citizen satisfaction with e-gov initiatives.

2) We can see how indivdual websites are doing compared to each other, compared to the private sector, and compared to themselves over time. There are 104 individual government websites included in the report from virtually every agency and department. Each website gets a score on a 100-point scale; the higher the better. Anything over 80 is generally considered excellent. Which websites have made the biggest improvements over the last quarter? Over the last year? Which sites are better than Amazon and Google? Which sites aren't doing so well?

3) We can quantify the role of online satisfaction on citizens' likelihood to return to the site, recommend it, even use it as a primary resource. We can do this in aggregate for the federal government overall, and for individual sites.

The data is being compiled and reported as we speak--everyone is busily getting everything together for the release on Tuesday.

The Role of the Web in Government - what do 81 million people want?

Did you know that 81 million Americans visited a Government Web Site in July?  This is according to a comScore release in early September.  If I am not mistaken that is more people then voted for our current President.

So what does this mean? There is a lot of buzz and activity going on e-gov these days, from cloud computing to social media to the talk of transparency.  But 81 million people visiting government websites in the month of July alone.  WOW.  That is a lot of traffic.  About 1/2 of the traffic the number of visitors to Google sites in July and almost the same amount of visitors to Facebook in July. 

Government agencies need to keep great focus on their websites.  There is where they can have the most influence on citizens.

Welcome Dave Lewan!

Our work in the government and nonprofit space has been exploding lately...between our thought leadership (our new e-gov transparency research, our report on satisfaction with nonprofit websites, and the quarterly ACSI E-Gov Index) and our client work (hundreds of federal, state, and local clients, along with numerous nonprofits and associations), we needed someone great to lead our work in this area.

Enter Dave Lewan, our new Director of Government and Public Sector Markets. You can read all about his excellent qualifications in our press release or on Linked In, but the main point is that we're excited about his strong leadership, which will help us continue to serve government and nonprofit clients with the solutions, methodology, and technology that will help them make the most of their online initiatives.

Feel free to email Dave (dave.lewan@foreseeresults.com) or visit him on Twitter to say hello (@davelewan) and we hope he'll be contributing to a new e-gov blog we have in the works. You'll have a chance to meet him and share your ideas with him next week at the Gov2.0 Summit in DC and again at our annual public sector user conference: Digital Citizen (Oct.8th in DC).

Welcome, Dave!

ACSI E-Gov Index Results and New Online Transparency Research

The ACSI's quarterly E-Gov Index was released today and we saw scores hold steady from last quarter--73.6 on the study's 100-point scale. Problem is, scores dropped last quarter, so we aren't seeing a rebound yet. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that departments and agencies are in a holding pattern waiting for specific guidance on how to implement all the fancy Web 2.0 stuff that the White House wants them to do. And the White House has been collecting public input about what they should do.

The hot new thing in government is open government, transparency, collaboration, participation . . . watch how often you see those words in memos and news conferences and government tweets.

This brings me to the other piece of research we released today on transparency and e-gov. We've seen over the years that online citizen satisfaction plays a huge role in government efficiency and effectiveness. So we decided to test out whether it related to online transparency, collaboration, participation, and even trust in government, Turns out there is a huge relationship.

Online customer satisfaction directly impacts citizens trust in government. Not only that, online satisfaction impacts their likelihood to participate and collaborate with an agency in the future. Highly satisfied federal website visitors are:
• 49% more likely to trust the agency or department overall;
• 54% more likely to participate in communication with the agency online or offline in the future;
• 73% more likely to collaborate with the agency online in the future using interactive features such as wikis or blogs;
• 54% more likely to return to the site;
• 78% more likely to recommend the site;
• 77% more likely to use the site as a primary resource for interaction with the agency overall.

This strikes me as huge. Just by improving the website, you can impact trust, collaboration, and even cost-saving behaviors like using the site as a primary resource.

So how do you increase satisfaction? It's going to differ from site to site, depending both on existing strengths and weaknesses and on the site's mission. But in aggregate, we found that the top priorities are online transparency and online search. That means that focusing on those two things will have the greatest impact on online satisfaction.

So in short, online transparency leads to online satisfaction. Online satisfaction leads to trust, collaboration, participation, cost savings, efficiency, effectiveness, and a chicken in every pot.

We're really excited about the potential of this research. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

Q1 E-Gov Satisfaction Results are Here

How are e-gov websites doing in the eyes of us citizens?  The latest report from ForeSee Results and the University of Michigan is now available, measuring over 100 e-government websites using the proven methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Quick Summary:
Overall satisfaction with e-gov sites is 73.6 (on a scale of 1-100) down from 74.1 last quarter. This follows 3 quarters of increases. 

Why?  One reason is expectations are much higher now then in the past.  With President Obama's internet savvy campaign and internet savvy staff, the expectations are for better, more usable and more functional e-gov sites.   Well, it has been 100 days, which is a lifetime in an internet company, but a relatively short time for Government.  The future looks bright but we are not there yet.

Get the full commentary here.

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google Agree on Something

 . . . and that is that info from federal government websites should be findable through using private sector search engines.

Apparently up to 1000 federal websites are not searchable on Google, Yahoo, Ask, or MSN because the information is held in a way that the search engines can't index it (often behind a form that needs to be filled out).

It will be interesting to see how this changes now that Obama has named Google and Yahoo people to his inner circles of tech advisors.

Sure, the search engines probably want access to the info because it will help them. But it also seems it would really help the citizenry if all of that information was available through a standard Google search instead of having to go to the agency website and know exactly what to look for.