The government’s satisfaction index is up, but still not what it should be

The latest poll of Americans’ satisfaction with service they get from the federal government is up. But with a score of 66 out of 100, the American Customer Satisfaction Index is still below pre-pandemic levels. To get more insight into the poll, the  Federal Drive with Tom Temin  with Forrest Morgeson, the former index research director, who is now a professor at Michigan State University.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin
So what do we make of this? The fact that it rose 4.6%. It’s up, it’s not up at the peak of about 2018 or ’19, was when the satisfaction index reached its most recent peak. It was much better back in the early aughts, you might say, so what’s going on here?

Forrest Morgeson
Well, I mean, I think some of it is a natural rebound. Obviously, the government had a difficult time providing services to citizens during the pandemic. And the years after that. And I think, very much like the private sector, you saw some negative customer experiences with the government. because of that. Because of just the load on the system, and the different demands that citizens had of the government. I think, as that has waned a little bit, I think it’s starting to go back to its more normal levels, the government still remains below its pre-COVID levels, as you mentioned, but it’s definitely trending in the right direction back to a more normal level.

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Tom Temin
Because if you look at the trend of the yearly scores from ’99, it looks like if you use the French curve to kind of even at all out. It’s a very slight downward trend in the past 24, 25 years or so, but not really a crash. But it’s trending slightly down on average. So it doesn’t seem like yearly events drive it that much. I mean, they do drive it that much. But there’s a slow decline over 20 years.

Forrest Morgeson
Yeah, I mean, big shocks are going to drive any index like this down where you have, really dramatic events that changed the way services can be provided, and customers or citizens can experience those services. We have seen that, sort of slight, gradual decline, that’s probably due, to some extent, with the government remaining relatively static and how it’s delivering its services. And huge sea changes in how the private sector is delivering its services. So comparatively speaking, the government’s still running out of 1.0 model in a lot of ways, whereas the private sector is 2.0.

Tom Temin
And I hate to tiptoe into this, what amounts to a grid of third rails, you can get electrocuted very easily. But does the political situation have anything to do with the Customer Satisfaction Index? People hate this president, they hate that president, half the country hates whoever’s in office at a given moment. But, does that affect the index?

Forrest Morgeson
Yeah, that’s a great question, and that’s something that we’ve certainly looked at. And there does tend to be in this data, what we can call a president in power effect, where we’re not measuring politics, we’re measuring the quality of services delivered by the federal government, just like we do in the private sector. Nevertheless, when you’ve got a change in presidential administration, and therefore a change in, something like 35% of the American people love versus hate, the other 30% are neutral. You do see some predictable movement there. In other words, when one party’s president takes office, having been out of power, they tend to get a little bit more satisfied with what they’re experiencing. And we would expect this, we wouldn’t want it to be entirely driven by this. But of course, there is that perception that who’s running the government is going to provide me the services, as I want them to, whether that’s broad policy based issues, like how I’m going to get taxed and how I’m going to do those sorts of things. So yeah, we do see some of that.

Tom Temin
All right. And just by point of reference, the Customer Satisfaction Index with the federal government, fluctuates the lowest point in recent years, the index was 63.9. The highest was 72.3, back in ’06. So there’s a range there 64 to 72, let’s say. How does that compare with the best of industry and the worst?

Forrest Morgeson
Well, it compares favorably to the worst of industry. Unfortunately, the worst of industry are your cable television companies, your internet service providers, industries that we don’t think of as being particularly strong. The federal government does score above those kinds of industries. Unfortunately, it’s well below, in some cases, 20 points or more. The best of the private sector, in terms of those companies that are offering services and products that we really, really love. Our Amazons, our Googles, our apple, those kinds of companies tend to score in the mid to even upper 80s over time. And so, there’s quite a gap there between the best of the private sector and what we’re getting from federal government.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Forrest Morgeson. He’s a professor of marketing at Michigan State University, and former research director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. And looking at the department by department index scores for last year. I think Interior is always at the top of the list, with a 75 index versus the average, again, of 66. And that’s probably, because of the National Park Service, which a lot of people avail online and have for many years. And at the bottom is, of course, Treasury. And we know how IRS agency itself admits, it just couldn’t answer the phones, in the last tax filing season and so forth. Paper built up, etc. So what do we make of like, say, in Agriculture, which did really well, right under Interior, and [Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)], which the average person doesn’t really deal with, is just above Treasury. Pretty low.

Forrest Morgeson
Yeah, I mean, most of the people that are going to HUD are doing it for some kind of paperwork for financial assistance for housing or something like that. And those processes, as we all know, generally are not particularly efficient, not particularly easy to complete, and therefore, they’re a burden for citizens and they get low scores. Agriculture, a lot of that is going to be, in terms of the citizen facing role of that agency, a lot of that is going to be people that are simply receiving food stamps from the Department of Agriculture, and that’s a relatively, relatively low burden activity that has a benefit at the end of it. You mentioned IRS, which is, perennially, our laggard and citizen satisfaction. Virtually every single year that we’ve been doing this, it comes in at the bottom, and you want to be fair. Obviously, I think most of us could agree that, IRS could do a better job providing the services that they offer, or at least picking up the phone, as you said. The reality is, though, is that they have a constrained budget, and they have a mission, that by its nature, is not going to ever be particularly satisfying. Taxation, and the taking of money from citizens is never going to be particularly satisfying. So the goal is to try to, in some cases, take what are inherently dissatisfying experiences, and make them as efficient and satisfying as you possibly can.

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Tom Temin
Because if you look at who interacts with government, in some ways, the federal government is the provider of last resort, with the SNAP program at Agriculture, unemployment insurance from Labor, Social Security, and disability payments, housing assistance, as you mentioned. So I wonder if the survey should be skewed, in terms of the sample, and get people that are, maybe not as wealthy, or at the poorer end of the socioeconomic scale, who tend to be the ones most accessing government. Because all the wealthy, well-off people, try to stay away as much as they can.

Forrest Morgeson
That’s an interesting point. The reality though is, of course, our broader goal at ACSI is to try to capture as much of the economic picture as we can, in terms of what government is offering, that’s going to cover the whole spectrum, the Postal Service all the way down to IRS, which virtually, everyone has to interact with at some level. So we want to capture that as much as we can. You’re right, though, I mean, there are different ways of defining who is really interacting with the government and how they’re doing so. Do we count total number of people? Do we count, in the private sector, we’re really geared towards those companies that are bigger, that have more revenue. And so there’s sort of a wealth dimension there. And we can’t do something exactly the same in the federal government. But it’s an interesting question, how do we consider these different groups and citizens that are interacting with the government? How do we accurately measure their experiences?

Tom Temin
And a detail question on the index survey itself. Veterans Affairs is not listed, and the Postal Service is not listed.

Forrest Morgeson
We measure the Postal Service separately. And there’s a pragmatic reason for doing that. First of all, we can compare it to FedEx, and UPS, and those kinds of things as a personal livery company in the private sector. And so we do that separately. The other reason is, of course, if we include that in our federal government sample, everyone will say, yes, I’ve experienced the U.S. Postal Service, and, well, we won’t get any interviews anywhere else. So we want to try to keep it a little bit broader, and keep it spread out a little bit more. So that’s why you don’t see that in there. You mentioned the Veterans Affairs, we simply allow respondents to tell us what they’ve interacted with from the federal government. And then our samples are driven by that, if we don’t have enough sample, we won’t include it. And so, while you’ve got a lot of veterans going through the Veterans Health Administration and Veterans Affairs, in general, we don’t have a ton of respondents for that, and therefore we don’t produce a score.

Tom Temin
And do any of the agencies ever react to the index operators? Do they ever hear back from them?

Forrest Morgeson
Oh, absolutely. Our data has been used a few times in congressional testimony, about the performance of government in general here in the United States. We know that these agencies, by law, are mandated to go in and do this kind of research, either on their own, or hire someone outside through the GPR and the GPRMA updates, about a decade ago. They’ve got to go out and do this kind of research. So they look at, either our data or data like ours, to try to better understand how citizens perceive the job that they’re doing, the work that they’re doing and how they can improve that.

 

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