Individuals also must be opportunity-minded, stresses Kaye. Custom er Satisfaction On the Rise G overnment services are recording higher satisfaction among customers, according to the most recent quarterly update of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures the quality of U.S. economic output. In fact, favorable ratings for government services, coupled with stable satisfaction scores for the manufacturing and durables sector of the economy, has caused the ACSI to have its first upwards move since its inception in 1994. This brings the ACSI to 71.1 on a 0-100 scale. Overall quality, which is a composite of the two, is the major driver of customer satisfaction in this industry, which has had a relatively stable ACSI score for four years.
Personal computers suffer from a four-point gap between service and product quality.
Because of worsening service to users, satisfaction with personal computers has declined 10 percent since 1994, despite sales increases that have expanded the customer base. The ACSI is co-sponsored by the American Society for Quality and the University of Michigan Business School, and is supported in part by corporate sponsors. It is based on interviews with 12,186 customers, combined with about 35,000 customer interviews conducted in the prior three quarters. Zinn, whose Princeton, New Jersey, firm specializes in executive searches, conducted an informal poll on reengineering's impact in Fortune 500, venture capital and financial companies. He found that morale was negatively affected as late as three or four years after reengineering, with people becoming overworked and overstressed.