About USA Services

Who We Are and What We Do

Customer Satisfaction Measurement Best Practices Study

As part of its mission to help agencies across the federal government improve service to citizens, USA Services contracted with the Pacific Consulting Group (PCG) to 1) identify best practices for measuring customer satisfaction that are already in use in the private and public sectors and 2) recommend to USA Services collection techniques, tools and metric types, either existing or new, that agencies should use to accurately measure customer satisfaction at points of interaction with customers of the federal government, especially though not exclusively, for government contact/call centers and web sites.  

Six types of customer contacts with the government have been identified as part of a segmentation created by the U.S. General Services Administration’s USA Services Division:  informational, beneficial, dutiful, commercial, intergovernmental, and exceptional.

Recommendations will be by categories/segments ( (yet to be determined)to take into account the uniqueness’s between types of government functions and their customers.  For example, agencies that give away information for free can sometimes immediately identify the satisfaction of their customers.  Another agency that deals with people under great stress and tries to comply with government regulations may not be able to immediately identify their customers’ satisfaction level.  Yet a third agency may deal with people for whom true service satisfaction can only be fully measured long after the initial contact has been made because, if polled immediately after receiving a contact center referral, satisfaction may be artificially high; if polled after acting on the referral information it may reflect a much lower, but more accurate level of satisfaction. Therefore, different techniques and tools may be necessary in different situations to meaningfully identify the true level of customer satisfaction with the government.

This project will assess customer satisfaction collection and measurement techniques, tools and metric types, and make recommendations on their use.

To support this project, ensuring PCG has constant input from agencies during its six month duration, an advisory council has been established with representatives from federal organizations including:

  1. Department of Defense - Defense Logistics Agency
  2. Department of Education
  3. Department of Homeland Security – Customs and Border Protection
  4. Department of Justice
  5. General Services Administration – Federal Acquisition Service
  6. Internal Revenue Service
  7. Library of Congress
  8. National Contact Center (1-800-FED INFO)
  9. Social Security Administration
  10. USA.Gov
  11. Veterans Administration

» For more information on this project please contact Robert Smudde at robert.smudde@gsa.gov.