GSA promises accurate and timely customer service center
A customer service center managed by the General Services Administration is now capable of answering questions on a wide range of government topics in two days or less, administration officials announced Wednesday.
Citizens with questions about federal services often do not know where to direct their inquiries, said Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget's e-government and information technology administrator. Now they can make one phone call or send a single e-mail and receive an accurate and timely answer.
The center, developed under the USA Services e-government initiative, consolidates existing information sources, including FirstGov.gov and the National Contact Center, under one roof. GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications, established in June 2002, administers the project. The information sources now under this office's jurisdiction processed about 100 million citizen requests from the beginning of fiscal 2002 to date.
Federal agencies are now encouraged to forward misdirected inquiries to GSA, and let staff at the National Contact Center respond. This service is free to agencies.
Agencies can also form partnerships with GSA and allow USA Services to manage all their customer inquiries. So far, 11 departments and agencies in addition to GSA have signed on: Agriculture, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, and Treasury, the Social Security Administration and the Small Business Administration. Eventually, GSA would like all federal agencies to sign up, said Mary Joy Jameson, associate administrator at GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications.
Partner agencies sit down with GSA staff members and develop lists of answers to frequently asked questions. The customer service center is then equipped to respond to the majority of the agency's inquiries, saving the agency time and allowing it to focus on other priorities, Jameson said.
Inquiries that are too complex for the customer service center are referred back to agencies, but GSA doesn't expect this to happen too often. In a test run with the Interior Department that began on July 1, USA Services bounced roughly 5 percent of questions back to agency experts, according to Teresa Nasif, director of GSA's Federal Consumer Information Center. The pilot project was also successful in meeting the two-day response deadline in almost all cases, she added.
Agencies that participate in USA Services will be expected to cover the costs of having GSA manage their inquiries, Jameson said. But the benefits of joining are great, she said. In addition to saving time, agencies will move toward earning a higher mark for e-government on OMB's traffic-light-style scorecard, she said.
While none of the individual information sources offered under USA Services are new, citizens will receive high-quality answers faster, now that the services are under one umbrella, Jameson said.
In addition to submitting inquiries about federal services, GSA's customer service center will handle requests for government publications and send them to the Federal Citizen Information Center, a publishing facility in Pueblo, Colo.
USA Services is one of 25 electronic government initiatives encouraged by the President's Management Agenda. "[This project] delivers on President Bush's e-government promise by dramatically improving citizen access to timely, reliable, consistent and secure information," said GSA Administrator Stephen Perry.
To test out USA Services' new capabilities, call the National Contact Center at 1-800-FED-INFO or go to FirstGov.gov to submit a question via e-mail.