Dive Brief:
- Businesses in the United States have poured over $100 billion annually into customer experience since 2013 with no significant return, the American Customer Satisfaction Index found in its latest report, released Tuesday.
- Customer satisfaction with U.S. businesses sits at 76.7 on a 100-point scale, the same as it was in 2013, according to ACSI.
- “It is troubling to know that businesses have been focused on customer experience management, customer relationship management, do-it-yourself kinds of customer surveying and data collection — all the things that you would expect should lead to a significant increase in satisfaction — and we just haven't seen that over this period,” Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI, told CX Dive.
Dive Insight:
Since 2013, the ACSI’s measure of customer satisfaction with U.S. businesses has moved up and down without a clear direction. Morgeson points to a lack of good, consistent data analysis and focusing on the wrong measurements as the main culprits.
“We've got a lot of data, but not a lot of good data analysts out there, people that are actually taking the data and doing something meaningful with it,” Morgeson said. “A lot of companies are still stuck in the sort of KPI environment where they get the data, put together a few metrics, look at them, compare them to last quarter or last month or week or whatever, and say, ‘OK, good to know.’”
In other words, brands are patting themselves on the back when their KPIs improve, without taking a more comprehensive and action focused approach to customer experience.
“Whatever their conclusions are, there's not a lot of robust and rigorous analysis of the data that you'd expect given all the investments we're making in the customer experience,” Morgeson said. “I think a lot of businesses are sort of enamored with the quantity of data they're able to collect now, and not really focus on the quality of the analysis of that data.”
The rate of customers complaining directly to businesses grew in the past year, too, from 15.1% in the first quarter of 2025 to a record 17.5% in the first quarter of 2026. That 16% increase suggests growing dissatisfaction, according to Morgeson.
There’s another interesting trend: While satisfaction hasn’t meaningfully budged, retention has grown. That shift is cause for concern and could be due to customers feeling that they don’t have other choices, according to the ACSI.
“Ultimately, what we're looking at here is a relationship between customer satisfaction and performance of the national economy,” Morgeson said. “And to the extent that industries are competitive, those two things should go together.”
