"Many top-performing government Web sites are using customer satisfaction measurement as a management metric, and it shows," Freed said. "When federal Web sites commit to collect and act on the 'voice of the customer,' they can focus their resources on areas that will have the most impact on satisfaction and future behavior. It's smart business and smart government."

There was even good news for government sites that didn't do such a great job keeping their customers happy, Freed said. The score for the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau's Web site rose five points to 63 from a year ago and was up three points in the last quarter, Freed said.

And the National Library of Medicine's health information repositories, MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en Espanol, continue to exceed expectations of their users, according to the report. Both sites have remained in the top performers' group for each of the 11 quarters in which they have been measured, according to the report.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has had high satisfaction scores of 80 or above since it was first measured in third quarter of 2004. Like the National Library of Medicine, the NCI recently began measuring customer satisfaction of the Spanish-language area of its cancer.gov site and received a score of 82, the report said.

Despite the generally high marks, Freed said agencies should continually work to improve their sites."The online evolution continues, and government sites, like their private-sector counterparts, must continue to stay one step ahead of citizens' evolving standards, which are shaped by the sum total of the Web sites they visit," he said.