I have been watching the American Customer Satisfaction Index for over 20 years. Many years, there wasn’t anything too surprising in the report. However, recently there has been, and it isn’t good news for most organizations.

After nearly two decades of investment in customer experience, only 20 percent of organizations have managed to improve their customer satisfaction scores—leaving the vast majority, 80 %, having failed to do so.

One has to wonder, has it been worth it? We have been working on delivering experiences that surprise and delight customers for years.

So, why aren’t they surprised and delighted? Why, despite all our best efforts, are the numbers going the opposite direction?

Before you blame COVID for all this, it is important to note that these trends began long before that, although the pandemic did nothing to help matters. Nor is it a problem of customers having unreasonable expectations. Research shows that as satisfaction declines, so do customer expectations.

It turns out that there are a number of variables that could be contributing to this decline in customer satisfaction, which offers a lot for organizations to learn.

We invited an expert, assistant professor Forrest Morgeson, from the marketing faculty at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and the director of research at the Customer Satisfaction Institute to share his insight. In this episode, we explore what this means to customer experience then, now and in the future. Where we are going with experiences, might surprise you.

Here are some other key moments in the discussion:

02:41 We introduce our guest, Forrest Morgeson, assistant professor of marketing at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and the director of research at the Customer Satisfaction Institute at Michigan
05:53 Morgeson answers my question about how satisfaction can be down at this point in time with two salient reasons.
15:46 Colin shares a story about apathy and how what he saw 20 years ago might be happening in C-suites all around the world as we gape into the void of a recession.
22:44 We ask Morgeson to explain what the data shows about satisfaction within industry, and what he tells us might surprise you.
26:59 Morgeson shares his predictions for what will happen next regarding customer satisfaction and changes in experiences.