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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.   Read the report.

Six types of customer contacts with the government were identified as part of a segmentation created by the U.S. General Services Administration’s USA Services Division.

The report makes recommendations for how to develop a meaningful customer satisfaction measurement program.  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.

In order to represent the breadth of the federal government, this project received oversight from an advisory council with representatives from federal organizations ensuring our vendor had constant input from during its eight month duration:

  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

Read the report!

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