Customer satisfaction

Despite all the effort and money poured into CX tools by companies, customer satisfaction continues to decline. In the United States, it is now at its lowest level in nearly two decades, per data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Consumer sentiment is also at its lowest in more than two decades. This negative dynamic in the customer-centric ecosystem in which we now live creates the challenge of figuring out what is going wrong and what companies can do to fix it.

The short answer is that companies need to create an amazing customer experience. Customers no longer only compare companies to their competitors. They compare with the best companies and brands across industries. But satisfaction across the board is in decline! That begs the question: What customer satisfaction areas should companies tackle strategically to create greater profit at lower risk?

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We base our answer on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for our book, The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States.

Here are the top 10 areas to focus on to satisfy customers and create greater profit at lower risk:

Customer Satisfaction is a Strategic Asset

The American Customer Satisfaction Index defines customer satisfaction as a strategic company asset that should be optimized. Satisfaction should not be maximized but also not ignored; optimization is the key. Companies thrive by delivering on customers’ satisfaction expectations in combination with quality, value, and complaint handling. The focus should then be to manage the optimization of satisfaction relative to customer expectations and company resources used.
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It is important to understand this optimization of customer satisfaction since there is a complicated — and ultimately negative — relationship between satisfaction and market share. That is, while high and improving satisfaction in smaller companies drives market-share growth, maintaining high satisfaction once the market share is larger becomes more difficult. This is because with a larger market share typically comes a more heterogeneous customer base and more diverse customer behaviors, which makes delivering high satisfaction more difficult.

Understand What Customers Expect
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What type of demands do customers have relative to their experiences with companies? Let’s start with the misnomer of sky-rocketing expectations. For the past 12 years, using ACSI data, customer expectations have been relatively steady at the macro level (across industries and companies), scoring between 79 and 82 on a 100-point scale (where 100 represents the highest expectations). Now, companies in the auto industry like BMW, Mercedes, and Toyota, seemingly always have much higher expectations than average (>90) from their customers that they have to manage.

Despite the steady cross-industry expectations, the popular choice for many businesses is to aim higher and higher, and at least to “always exceed customer expectations.” Is this the future trend in customer expectations? Practically, it is a flawed argument since companies should avoid promising to “always exceed expectations,” as attempting such a strategy is not sustainable. Companies can and should delight the customer with an amazing experience but with realistic aims.

Quality Performance Matters

How have customers’ quality perceptions evolved (brands, products, and services)? Important in this context is what constitutes quality. Quality, as measured within the ACSI, refers to reliability and customizability, but customizability dominates reliability as a driver of satisfaction. At the macro-level, for the past 12 years quality has been residing in the 79 to 83 range on a 100-point scale (where 100 is the highest quality). For example, Quaker has impressive scores on overall quality, with BMW and Publix peaking in product and service quality, respectively.

A key issue moving forward is likely to be strategies for improving satisfaction in the absence of gains in perceived quality for many companies. Contrary to what managers often think, quality trumps price. More broadly, quality also trumps value as a driver of customer satisfaction across most economic sectors and industries. Plus, we live in a “mass customization” economy, which is reflected in satisfaction being more sensitive to the personalizability than the reliability of products and services.

Understanding Trading Strategies
A trading strategy includes a well-considered investing and trading plan that specifies investing objectives, risk tolerance, time horizon, and tax implications. Ideas and best practices need to be researched and adopted then adhered to. Planning for trading includes developing methods that include buying or selling stocks, bonds, ETFs, or other investments and may extend to more complex trades such as options or futures.

Placing trades means working with a broker or broker-dealer and identifying and managing trading costs including spreads, commissions, and fees. Once executed, trading positions are monitored and managed, including adjusting or closing them as needed. Risk and return are measured as well as portfolio impacts of trades and tax implications.
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The longer-term tax results of trading are a major factor and may encompass capital gains or tax-loss harvesting strategies to offset gains with losses.
Developing a Trading Strategy
There are many types of trading strategies, but they are based largely on either technicals or fundamentals. The common thread is that both rely on quantifiable information that can be backtested for accuracy. Technical trading strategies rely on technical indicators to generate trading signals. Technical traders believe all information about a given security is contained in its price and that it moves in trends.
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For example, a simple trading strategy may be a moving average crossover whereby a short-term moving average crosses above or below a long-term moving average.


Fundamental trading strategies take fundamental factors into account. For instance, an investor may have a set of screening criteria to generate a list of opportunities. These criteria are developed by analyzing factors such as revenue growth and profitability.
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There is a third type of trading strategy that has gained prominence in recent times. A quantitative trading strategy is similar to technical trading in that it uses information relating to the stock to arrive at a purchase or sale decision. However, the matrix of factors that it takes into account to arrive at a purchase or sale decision is considerably larger compared to technical analysis. A quantitative trader uses several data points—regression analysis of trading ratios, technical data, price—to exploit inefficiencies in the market and conduct quick trades using technology.

Special Considerations
Trading strategies are employed to avoid behavioral finance biases and ensure consistent results. For example, traders following rules governing when to exit a trade would be less likely to succumb to the disposition effect, which causes investors to hold on to stocks that have lost value and sell those that rise in value. Trading strategies can be stress-tested under varying market conditions to measure consistency.

Profitable trading strategies are difficult to develop, however, and there is a risk of becoming over-reliant on a strategy. For instance, a trader may curve fit a trading strategy to specific backtesting data, which may engender false confidence. The strategy may have worked well in theory based on past market data, but past performance does not guarantee future success in real-time market conditions, which may vary significantly from the test period.