Dive Brief:
- Customer satisfaction across industries dropped for a third consecutive quarter, the American Customer Satisfaction Index said in a report Tuesday.
- Satisfaction dipped 0.1% quarter over quarter to 76.9 on a 100-point scale in Q2 2025.
- Quality, price and quantity all play a role in the downward satisfaction trend, according to Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI. “What we're seeing is consumers [say], ‘Alright, I'm still getting less than what I got five or 10 years ago, and I'm not as happy with the service that I'm getting.’ So it's sort of a combination of how much they're getting and the price they're paying for it.”
Dive Insight:
Consumer sentiment has tumbled in recent quarters as economic uncertainty and rising prices — set off by shifting trade policies — have made consumers price conscious and ill at ease.
To make matters worse, customer experience quality fell in 2025 for the fourth consecutive year, as many businesses lost track of their customer-obsessed strategies, according to Forrester.
While the dip in customer satisfaction in Q2 is minor, the trend of declining satisfaction is significant — and concerning, Morgeson said.
“What we see here is that we've got a fairly prolonged downward trajectory over the last year or so,” he said.
In the past decade, satisfaction has been marked by two periods, Morgeson said. There was a long, prolonged decline in satisfaction before and during the COVID pandemic. Then, satisfaction swiftly rebounded, followed by this recent decline over the last year or so that wiped out any satisfaction gains.
Now, satisfaction is the same level it was 12 years ago, which is “not really what you want to see for an economy that’s improving the quality of its offerings,” Morgeson said.
During the same period, profits grew. Net profit margins have increased by 3% to 4% over the past decade. Earlier this year, they reached 11% — meaning that for every $1 of revenue, businesses saw on average $0.11 in net profit.
That indicates profit taking, Morgeson said. “Rather than being concerned with their long-term competitive health in the sense of attracting and keeping customers, they're doing everything to take profits,” Morgeson said. “That's a good short-term strategy that shareholders like, but if prices are going up for consumers, their satisfaction is going down.”
Hiking prices on customers while delivering less is not a recipe for long-term success, Morgeson said. He hopes businesses take the findings into account and prioritize customer relationships to the extent that it leads to their long-term health.
“We have seen this sort of play out in the past, where companies will focus more on their own profitability rather than on their long-term customer relationships,” Morgeson said. “Sometimes it takes disruptors to aggravate, to come into markets and win over a large number of customers with new, better offerings for that to happen.”
