American CSAT Index Explained

Often we talk about “good” vs. “bad” customer satisfaction scores. The idea is fairly simple – you want high customer satisfaction scores, because the higher they are the more (likely) you will bring in excess revenue for the company.

But as we’ve mentioned, what makes a good satisfaction score differs depending on the company and its products. Depending on things like competition, price, convenience, etc., some companies can get away with lower satisfaction scores while still maintaining a profit. Every company needs to try to figure out their own satisfaction needs and follow trends to see how they are doing as a business.

There are also shortcuts that can help you discover the baseline for your company’s satisfaction scores. One is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

ACSI is a for-profit company that runs their own customer satisfaction research in order to find satisfaction levels of customers and the companies they frequent. Their research spans roughly 200 companies and 43 different industries, and then weights the data and releases it (for a fee) for public use. It surveys many of the most well-known companies in the industries and releases that data in rolling averages, while also providing some of the data for public consumption.

The information has a lot of different uses. But its primary use for companies is to establish benchmarks for their own customer satisfaction data. By taking the exact questions asked by ACSI, running a survey, obtaining the results and comparing it to the nationwide average for the industry, the company will then have a baseline that they can use to judge their own results and determine where they stand in the industry.

ACSI helps to create a valuable baseline that your company can use to figure out how its satisfaction levels measure against industry standards. This is a useful way to know how your business is doing when compared to its peers.

However, it should be noted that there are other factors involved, and you should never take these stats as gospel. Customer satisfaction may relate to sales in ways that are different for your company than they are for others. Still, the data inside of the American Customer Satisfaction Index may be useful for any company that wants to see how it stands in the business world, and at the very least you can learn whether your customer satisfaction efforts are working.