ANN ARBOR – The American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Government Satisfaction Index maintains the highest level of citizen satisfaction with online government since the Index began seven years ago. Satisfaction with e-government scores 75.2 on ACSI’s 100-point scale for a second consecutive quarter. Year over year, the Index improves 1.5 percent. The score is 8 percent higher than the 2009 ACSI score for offline federal government services, which scores 68.7.

The results come as President Obama completes his first year in office and offer an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the President?s e-government initiatives. After a slow start and a small drop in the first quarter of 2009, e-government satisfaction reached its current highs during the last two quarters. A focus on increased transparency, which increases overall trust in government, contributes to e-government?s strong performance.

“Obama’s Open Government Directive provides federal agencies with an unambiguous charge to increase transparency, participation and collaboration,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. “Few channels are as well suited to the task as the website.”

Added Dave Lewan, Director of Government and Public Markets at ForeSee Results:

“E-government that satisfies citizens achieves the goals of increasing participation and transparency, specific goals of the Open Government Directive. E-gov also achieves more traditional goals related to efficiency and cost savings.”

According to the report, citizens who are highly satisfied with a federal government website are 52 percent more likely to trust the government and 50 percent more likely to participate with the government than those who are less satisfied. Satisfied citizens are also 80 percent more likely to use the website as a primary resource before considering other, more costly channels. Also, they are 77 percent percent more likely to recommend the website and 51 percent more likely to return to the website.

Overall, e-government significantly trails private-sector industries like portals and search engines (83) and e-retail (82), but it scores better than news and information sites and online brokerage and investment (74). However, e-government significantly outperforms offline government in terms of citizen satisfaction.

Several individual e-government sites are keeping pace with the constant improvements and innovations of the private sector, despite the disparity of resources. In fact, the best performing federal government websites exceed even the top performers in the private sector. Social Security Administration?s Retirement Estimator and iClaim both score 90, better than ACSI e-commerce champion Newegg.com (88) and stalwart Amazon.com (86).

“Satisfaction with federal websites is flat this quarter, so it may be a little early to say if e-government is in a plateau or about to hit its stride. But federal agencies need to continue to adapt to the needs of their citizens, and those needs vary from agency to agency. That’s what the private sector does so well. And if e-government can do the same, we can expect satisfaction to resume its climb,” said Claes Fornell, founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index and professor at the University of Michigan.

More than 250,000 surveys were conducted during the fourth quarter of 2009. There are 103 sites included in the Index this quarter.

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