Abstract
Viewed from the lens of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), customer satisfaction is a strategic company asset that should be optimized, not maximized, and certainly not ignored. Companies do not thrive only by delivering on increasingly higher customer satisfaction. They thrive by managing the optimization of customer satisfaction. Consequently, customer satisfaction levels change over time, and impacts on a company’s operations and financial performance are the focus. Given these issues, the scope of ACSI and its customer-centric assessment of the quality and quantity of national economic output are discussed in this chapter. Beyond customer satisfaction, the ACSI model also includes customer expectations, quality (product and service), value, complaint behavior, and customer loyalty at the company, industry, economic sector, and national levels.
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Notes
- 1.
In the chapters to come, our analysis will often talk of “25 years of ACSI data.” In reality, though, most of the comparisons and analyses of over-time changes will involve data between 1994 and 2017, or only 24 full calendar years. The difference is mostly semantics, however, as including the pre-test phase, the ACSI project entered its 25th year as a measurement project in 2017.
- 2.
Importantly, almost all of the ACSI survey questions are asked on a 1–10, low to high scale from, for example, “very poor quality” to “very good quality,” “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied,” and so forth. For ease of interpretation, the resulting 1–10 scaled variables are converted to a 0–100 index score, primarily for ease of interpretation among non-statisticians. Two exceptions that will be relevant for understanding later chapters are customer complaints—measured as a 0–1, no-yes variable—and customer retention, which is the product of a non-linear transformation of a 1–10 repurchase likelihood variable transformed to a percentage estimate of retained customers.
- 3.
Multiple quality control checks were performed before ACSI transitioned from CATI data collection using random-digit dial to online panel interviewing in the early 2010s. Results from these pre-tests consistently provided evidence of little to no survey mode effect in the resulting data.
- 4.
While we will avoid going into too much esoteric statistical detail throughout the book, a simplified definition of a latent variable is any variable that cannot be directly observed, but is rather observed indirectly by combining multiple pieces of observed information together—in this case, multiple related but separate survey questions. In short, for our purposes latent variables are multiple survey questions statistically weighted and modeled together, and that produce the key scores and impacts analyzed in the ACSI model.
- 5.
Due to fluctuations in the number of companies measured and in the quantity of individual survey interviews per company collected, the total annual sample collected by ACSI has varied over time. In 1994, the first year of regular measurement, approximately 50,000 survey interviews were collected. By 2017, and for the aforementioned reasons, that annual sample had increased to more than 200,000. As of publication of this text, that number has increased to nearly 300,000.
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Fornell, C., Morgeson, F.V., Hult, G.T.M., VanAmburg, D. (2020). Defining Customer Satisfaction: A Strategic Company Asset?. In: The Reign of the Customer. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13562-1_1
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