AMERICAN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INDEX ACSI

An index that provides information on how satisfied U.S. consumers are with the quality of products and services available to them. The American Customer Satisfaction Index produces four levels of indexes or scores - a national customer satisfaction score, 10 economic sector scores, 43 industry scores, and scores for more than 200 companies and federal government agencies. The ACSI is an important indicator of economic performance for individual firms as well as the macro economy.

Stocks of companies with high ACSI scores tend to do better than those of companies with low scores, while the national ACSI score has been shown to predict trends in both consumer spending and stock market growth.

The index uses customer interviews as inputs to a multi-equation econometric model developed at the University of Michigan. The index was first published in October 1994, and is updated quarterly on a rolling basis, with new data for one or more economic sectors replacing data collected the previous year.