From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans

CHAPTER 4

The Competitive Bar

Despite years of trying, the sad truth is that many companies are leaving no better impression on customers today than they did 25 years ago. The statistics are eye-opening.

In the summer of 1994, Dr. Claes Fornell launched the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a broad cross-industry measure of customer experience quality (first referenced in Chapter 3). Fornell developed the index to fill a void he saw, which was the absence of any national gauge of product and service quality.¹ Over a quarter century (and millions of consumer interviews) later, the ACSI remains a prominent customer experience metric that is frequently cited in the media.

ACSI scores range from 0 (the worst) to 100 (the best). In the ...