Satisfaction Index (ACSI)

Fornell (1992) introduced the national customer satisfaction barometer in Sweden, and Fornell et al. (1996) presented the American Customer Satisfaction Index as a structural model: customer expectations, perceived quality, and perceived value drive satisfaction, and satisfaction drives complaints and loyalty, measured every year across the sectors of an economy. The cell marks the point at which satisfaction stopped being a survey item and became an economic indicator.

All six cells sit in the Outcomes block, one of five families with no block drift in sixty years. The index is the hinge: the two cells before it ask what satisfaction is; the three after it ask what it is worth.

Four curated Core Table links carry the index into other families: CSR and Market Value (Cs), Productivity Chain (Mp), Customer Experience (Cx), and Performance Outcomes (Po). A further 29 deep-dive cells in eight families name it, from Working Relationships in Channels to Order Fulfillment and Loyalty in Supply Chain.

One curated link in: Service Quality (Sq), whose quality and value constructs the index models as antecedents. Its own reference lists reach outside marketing: Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) supplies the complaint-or-leave logic, and Porter's Competitive Strategy (1980) the idea that satisfaction is a competitive position.

Twelve of the 26 citing anchors sit in the Satisfaction and Loyalty deep dive. The other fourteen are elsewhere: Marketing Capabilities (Vorhies and Morgan, 2005), Brand Portfolio (Morgan and Rego, 2009), CRM Process (Reinartz, Krafft, and Hoyer, 2004), Marketing and Systematic Risk (Tuli and Bharadwaj, 2009), Market-Oriented Culture (Homburg and Pflesser, 2000), and Integrative Supply Chain Strategy (Vickery et al., 2003). The index became the dependent variable for streams that never set out to study satisfaction.