DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04208
title: American Customer Satisfaction Index, 1996
title: Archival Version

description: The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a uniform and independent measure of household consumption experience. The ACSI tracks trends in customer satisfaction and provides benchmarking insights into the consumer economy for companies, industry trade associations, and government agencies. It is based on modeling customer evaluations of the quality of goods and services that are purchased in the United States and produced by both domestic and foreign firms that have substantial United States market shares. The ACSI model is a set of causal equations that link customer expectations, perceived quality, and perceived value to customer satisfaction. In turn, satisfaction is linked to consequences as defined by customer complaints and customer loyalty -- measured by price tolerance and customer retention. Customer expectations combine customers' experiences with a product or service and information about it via media, advertising, salespersons, and word-of-mouth. Customer expectations influence the evaluation of quality and forecast how well the product or service will perform. Perceived quality of a product or service is measured through questions on its overall quality, reliability, and the extent to which it meets the customer's needs. Perceived value is measured through questions on overall price given quality and overall quality given price. Customer complaints activity is measured as the percentage of respondents who reported a problem with the measured company's product or service within a specified time frame. Satisfaction has an inverse relationship to customer complaints. Customer loyalty is measured through questions on the likelihood that customers will purchase a company's products or services at various price points. The ACSI is produced through a partnership of the University of Michigan Business School, the American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the international consulting firm, CFI Group. Background variables include age, education, number of family members, Hispanic origin, race, household income, sex, industry, and sector of the economy.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: First Quarter Data 
 DS2: Second Quarter Data 
 DS3: Third Quarter Data 
 DS4: Fourth Quarter Data
description: American Customer Satisfaction Index Series
description: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) 
 (1) These data were collected quarterly and are broken into four datasets covering 1996. The variable, QTR, in the dataset is the economic quarter to which the data refer. (2) The data collections for 1994 and 1995 were released through ICPSR under the titles AMERICAN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INDEX, 1994 (ICPSR 3973) and AMERICAN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION INDEX, 1995 (ICPSR 4103), respectively. (3) For additional information, including related publications, visit the ACSI Web site.
description: American consumers aged 18 to 84 living in households with telephones in the continental United States.
description: Households were selected by random-digit dialing. Within households, the respondent selected was the adult with the nearest birthday to the date of the interview who had purchased or consumed specific products and services within specified, recent time periods varying from three months to three years, according to the product or service. The probability sample selected to represent the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for each company was based on approximately 250 customer interviews.