Monday 14 September 2009

Customer Satisfaction, Share Price, Quality of Service

Work led by Claes Fornell has shown that customer satisfaction is a lead indicator of share price. The well-established links between customer satisfaction and corporate value do not seem to be exploited by the usability community. Example papers can be found here, here and here.

Findings by his company in the UK are reported here. Familiar faces do well; Toyota, Virgin. In the UK mobile field, Tesco Mobile seems to be doing well. Given the solid nature of Fornell's survey methods, it seems surprising that OFCOM doesn't use them. NIH perhaps?

To quote from a 2006 paper,

" Specifically, the authors find that customer satisfaction, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), is significantly related to market value of equity.Yet news about ACSI results does not move share prices. This apparent inconsistency is the catalyst for
examining whether excess stock returns might be generated as a result. The authors present two stock portfolios:
The first is a paper portfolio that is back tested, and the second is an actual case. At low systematic risk, both outperform the market by considerable margins. In other words, it is possible to beat the market consistently by investing in firms that do well on the ACSI."

1 comment:

  1. Satisfaction and usability do indeed go hand in hand, and the ACSI is the best way to measure satisfaction because it has a proven relationship to financial performance at the macro and micro levels.

    In addition to measuring satisfaction, ACSI models offer the diagnostic capability of quantifying and comparing the drivers of satisfaction, which can help to direct the focus of usability research.

    www.theACSI.org provides detail about publicly-released satisfaction data.

    www.ForeSeeResults.com is the resource for measuring the ACSI for websites in particular.

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