Citizen satisfaction with federal government websites declines for a third consecutive quarter, according to the first quarter report of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index. The Index aggregate score for the first quarter of 2008 fell to 72.4 on ACSI’s 100-point scale, its lowest score in thee years and a full point lower than one year ago.

“These are trying times for the American consumer. Customer satisfaction is declining overall, and the government isn’t doing any better,” said Prof. Claes Fornell, head of ACSI at the University of Michigan. “Citizen satisfaction with e-government is now slipping like everything else.”

The report cites two possible factors contributing to the decline in satisfaction this quarter. In this election year, there is no clear sense that the level of focus or commitment to improving e-government will be shared with a new administration. Some presidential candidates have mentioned the importance of the Internet to improving the citizen experience, and others have not mentioned anything at all.

“When President Bush made e-government a priority in his management agenda, we saw an improvement in satisfaction. But there’s no telling whether or not that commitment will be shared by a new administration,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results and author of the report. “Some government websites may be holding off on putting the necessary resources into improving the citizen experience until they have a better sense of whether or not they’ll be able to finish what they start. Unfortunately, citizens are the big losers when e-government is in limbo.”

A second contributing factor to slipping satisfaction with federal websites is the decline in the category of portals and department main sites, which dropped more than three points to 71.7 since reaching its all-time high in the second quarter of 2006. Portals and department main sites – which serve either as the gateway to a department or to link users to information from external sources -- often face the challenge of not being able to control all of the site features and content that affect citizen satisfaction.

Citizen satisfaction with the e-commerce/transaction category of federal websites continues to improve. The category climbs 1.5 percent this quarter to 75.7, but not enough to offset the declines from every other category, including news/information (-0.8% to 71.7) and career/recruitment (-0.1% to 77.1). Despite the improvement, the e-commerce category still lags private sector e-commerce significantly.

“The increasing scores for the e-commerce category of e-government indicate that citizens are eager for government sites to evolve from information sources to conduits for conducting business with the government,” said Freed.