Critics call federal customer survey a PR gimmick

Critics of the federal government's first-ever governmentwide customer satisfaction survey are calling the effort a "public relations gimmick" and a waste of taxpayer money.

Virginia Thomas, senior fellow for government studies at the Heritage Foundation, said the customer groups agencies chose to survey were too small to offer meaningful results.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, surveyed only reference librarians who used the agency's Web site. NASA surveyed only educators who visited a NASA facility during the week of June 21, 1999. Thomas also questioned the usefulness of asking government benefits recipients, like parents of Head Start students and beneficiaries of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrional program, whether they are satisfied customers.

"These are like surveying your children after they open Christmas presents on whether they like you as parents," Thomas said.

The results of the first-ever survey were released Monday. The survey ranked selected government services on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which has been used since 1994 to measure customer satisfaction with about 200 private sector firms. In aggregate, the government ranked at 68.6 on a scale of 100, compared to 72 for the average private sector firm, the survey said.

A Senate staffer, who requested anonymity, echoed Thomas' criticisms, saying the Clinton administration's spin on the survey hid its shortcomings.

"The cheerleading going on really masks any real measure of performance," the staffer said.

Morley Winograd, director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, defended the survey methodology, though he conceded that the effort's validity could be improved.

"This was the first attempt at doing this survey by agencies, and their ability to find customers we could talk to was in some cases difficult," Winograd said. Winograd noted that in calculating governmentwide statistics, larger customer groups were given greater weight than smaller customer groups, so the librarians surveyed for the EPA were not treated equally with all U.S. taxpayers, one of the customer groups surveyed for the IRS.

Thomas questioned the value of the survey from a management perspective, arguing that it only suggests how people perceive an agency's performance but fails to show how well the agency actually performs.

"There are a ton of performance problems with government that could have used an investment of funds to solve," Thomas said. "I can't believe people used taxpayer money to come up with this PR gimmick."

Donald F. Kettl, a public administration scholar at the University of Wisconsin, said the government should be commended for even attempting to measure customer satisfaction with federal programs.

"That the survey was conducted at all was an accomplishment," Kettl said. But he agreed that many government programs-both those that benefit people, such as WIC, and those that mandate behaviors, such as regulatory programs of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration-cannot be compared to private-sector services. Similarly, many employees of the federal government, from State Department policy makers to procurement specialists at the Pentagon, perform work that does not have a clear customer base.

Claes Fornell, director of the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan Business School, said the results offer an indication of citizen satisfaction with government as a whole, but are best used to evaluate satisfaction among the separate customer groups. Fornell's center, along with consulting firm Arthur Andersen and the American Society for Quality, administered the survey.

"While the scores can be read to provide valuable insight into the performance of an individual agency in general, the greatest usefulness of the scores is in understanding how well the government is serving the customer segment indicated," Fornell said.

The Senate staffer said agencies should attempt to measure their entire customer bases. He said the National Science Foundation, which measured satisfaction with people who both received and were denied grants, and the IRS, which measured all taxpayers, should serve as models for other agencies.