U.S. customer satisfaction stagnant after 13 years of spend: ACSI
WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES — United States businesses have invested more than $100 billion annually in customer experience (CX) management since 2013 — and customer satisfaction is exactly where it was when that spending began.
According to a report from CX Dive, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) registered 76.7 out of 100 in Q1 2026, identical to the 2013 level, and the organization’s latest report finds no meaningful improvement across the 13-year period.
$100 billion spent, satisfaction score unchanged
The ACSI attributes the stagnation to three structural failures: inadequate data analysis, an overreliance on KPI-focused approaches that lack analytical rigor, and a systemic prioritization of data quantity over analysis quality.
A score of 76.7 is not a measure of recent underperformance — it is the same number the U.S. posted in 2013, meaning the entire CX investment cycle of the past decade has failed to move the fundamental measure of whether customers are actually satisfied.
“It is troubling to know that businesses have been focused on customer experience management… and we just haven’t seen that over this period,” said Forrest Morgeson, Associate Professor of Marketing at Michigan State University and Director of Research Emeritus at ACSI.
Complaints rise as retention masks the problem
Customer complaints increased from 15.1% in Q1 2025 to 17.5% in Q1 2026, a 16% year-on-year rise that signals accelerating service deterioration even as the headline satisfaction number holds.
ACSI identified a structural paradox: customer retention has grown over the same period satisfaction stagnated — a pattern the index characterizes as customers feeling trapped without viable competitive alternatives, not customers who are genuinely loyal.
If customers feel trapped, as ACSI suggests, elevated retention is not a CX success metric — it is a market structure problem that masks the absence of genuine satisfaction.
For contact center and CX outsourcing firms, the ACSI data reframes the brief: the structural problem is not a lack of investment but a failure of analytical discipline — the inability to convert CX data into actionable insight rather than KPI reporting.
Business process outsourcing (BPO) providers with embedded analytics capabilities and outcome-linked delivery models are positioned to address precisely the gap the ACSI has spent 13 years measuring.
As enterprises begin to interrogate what a trillion dollars in cumulative CX spend has actually bought, the conversation is shifting from platform headcount to measurable satisfaction outcomes.
