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       The American economy is all geared to consuming more… quantity is what we measure… and quantity is the benechmark for evaluating economic conditions… and surely we are a “big” nation… in many ways… but maybe there are more interesting measures…

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is an economic indicator based on modeling of customer evaluations of the quality of goods and services. The survey is undertaken at the University of Michigan.

The Index was developed to provide information on satisfaction with the quality of products and services available to consumers. ACSI was designed to measure the quality of economic output as a complement to traditional measures of the quantity of economic output.

I was most interested in consumers perception of quality at the primary web services groups… guess who is number one?… That’s easy… but why?  Intuition says “ease of use”… spare, restful visuals… no eye candy…  no click clutter… just lots of useful, effective, powerful choices to accomplish what we need to do… here’s the numbers from the 2Q ‘08 satisfaction survey (previous years # bracketed) …

Google:                86   (78)
Yahoo:                 77   (79)
MSNBC.com:        76   (74)
ABCNews.com:    75   (74)
MSN:                    75   (75)
NYTimes.com:     75   (73)
Ask:                     74   (75
CNN.com:            73   (73)
USAToday.com:    73   (72)
AOL:                     69   (67)

From the study commentary for 2Q ‘08 … ~~ “… The small increase in overall customer satisfaction is mostly due to what consumers see as slightly better “value for money,” but improvements in quality are also playing a role. Customer loyalty is up slightly and complaints are down. Buyer expectations show no inflationary tendencies…” ~~

Now of course this measure lacks any weight because we don’t map quality into purchasing decisions or give it weight in the actions of the “invisible hand”.

:::::   Quality versus quantity  ::::::