The growing level of satisfaction was noted in the latest findings of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which showed a significant improvement in the quality of e-government Latest News about e-government over the past nine months. Conversely, though, it also reports that there continues to be a very wide disparity among agencies and types of sites in terms of how well they deliver overall user satisfaction.
"We see mixed results in terms of how successful agencies are, but one common theme is that channel loyalty is generally quite strong," said Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, which assisted in the study. Freed said the report indicates an average likelihood to return score of 81 and recommend score of 76 on the ACSI's 100-point scale.
"The high return and recommend numbers mean this is a make-or-break opportunity for e-government to become a preferred channel and grow -- or fail to stay ahead of expectations and wither," he added.
311 Calling
Indeed, this message does not appear to be lost on government entities of all sizes. CRM vendors have been responding to a demand for better channel-management applications for government entities -- in particular, the 311 call-center channel. Onyx Latest News about Onyx, Remedy, PeopleSoft and Siebel are just a few of the vendors that either have rolled out new initiatives or stepped up existing ones.
In fact, government looks to be one of the biggest buyers of CRM software these days, Yankee Group's Sheryl Kingstone told NewsFactor, citing an unusually high level of state, local and federal RFPs in the industry pipeline these days.
Paying Off
On the surface, at least, it appears these efforts are paying off -- in gratitude from constituents, if not in actual ROI -- for the government.
ACSI's analysis showed a strong rate of improvement in e-government, on average, over the past nine months. During that time, the original study set of agencies improved an average of 5.4 percent -- eclipsing the rate of improvement in the ACSI satisfaction score for the U.S. economy overall, which rose .8 percent during the same period. In a roughly comparable timeframe, commercial e-business Latest News about e-business satisfaction increased an average of 3.9 percent.
The Department of State's student site and the Federal Aviation Administration's Latest News about Federal Aviation Administration main site improved the most, according to the study -- eight points and six points respectively over a nine-month period. The Office of Personnel Management's main government-recruiting site, USAJobs, improved by five points, and the Department of State's careers site jumped six points.
Also, the Department of Transportation increased three points in just three months -- but with a score of 58, there is still much room for improvement, ACSI pointed out.
Autor: Erika Morphy
Quelle: CRM Daily, 21.06.2004
