Federal Government: Monopoly on Worst Experiences

According to opinion polls, Americans think that the federal government is too large and powerful. Most people do not trust the federal government to handle problems. Only one-third of people think that the government gives competent service, and the public’s “customer satisfaction” with federal services is lower than for virtually all private services. I discussed these sad realities in this study.

NextGov.com reports today on a new customer satisfaction study:

Despite a major push by the Obama administration in recent years, the federal government “still fails at customer experience,” according to Forrester Research’s Customer Experience Index.

The federal government finished dead last among 21 major industries, and had five of the eight worst scores of the 319 brands, leading Forrester to note that government has a “near monopoly on the worst experiences.”

Notably, HealthCare.gov ranked last among all brands ... USAJobs.gov, the departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Transportation Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, Medicaid and the Small Business Administration rated in the bottom 6 percent of all brands.

This was not a small-sample poll. Forrester’s Index was based on perceptions from surveys of 122,500 adult customers.

“For me, the most compelling point is that federal agencies are clustered near the bottom of the index,” Rick Parrish, senior analyst at Forrester, told Nextgov. “So many agencies that have been working hard haven’t shown improvement. You see a lot of action, a lot of arm-waving and noise, but not a lot of progress.” Even the worst brands in the worst industries—TV and internet service providers, and some airlines—generally outperformed federal agencies.

An irony of Big Government is that even as Congress has created hundreds of new programs to supposedly help people, and dishes out more than $2 trillion a year in subsidies, the public has not grown fonder of the government. Instead, people have become more alienated from it, and more disgusted by its poor performance.

For more on government failure, see here.