A New Approach to Measuring Customer Satisfaction

When STRATMOR set out to establish a usable gauge for customer satisfaction in the mortgage industry, we started with the best standard we could find in use at the time by other industries. It turns out that there is not only a current measure in use, but an organization chartered to research customer satisfaction and to develop tools for U.S. businesses intent on improving this metric.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), founded at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States.

The ACSI uses data from interviews with roughly 70,000 customers annually as inputs to an econometric model for measuring satisfaction with more than 230 companies in 47 industries and 10 economic sectors, as well as over 100 services, programs, and websites of federal government agencies. The ACSI is the only measure of customer satisfaction whose predictive link to financial results are confirmed by third party independent peer review and the market.

Even so, the ACSI’s metrics did not fit well with the needs of the mortgage industry. We needed to take the bulk of the research that went into the index and make it match up with the specific needs of mortgage bankers. Instead of setting off in pursuit of that mission alone, we enlisted the support of CFI Group, co-founder of the ACSI, to create a working satisfaction gauge for the banking community

CFI Group is a global leader in providing customer feedback insights through analytics. CFI Group provides a technology platform that leverages the science of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). This platform continuously measures the customer experience across multiple channels, benchmarks performance, and prioritizes improvements for maximum impact. We partnered with CFI in 2013 to create a similar index for the mortgage industry.