Both the Swedish version and the ACSI were developed by Claes Fornell, Donald C. Cook Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the University of Michigan, and chairman of CFI Group.
One set of findings discovered by academic researchers involve predictions of macroeconomic growth as functions of changes in aggregate customer satisfaction.
[9][10] A 2016 article in the same journal,[11] examining returns from a fund trading exclusively on ACSI data, found that strong satisfaction companies significantly outperformed the S&P 500 (518% to 31%) during the study period (2000-2014).
Research groups, quality associations and universities in several countries are using the ACSI model to create customer satisfaction indices for their own national economies.
The list of governments that have adopted the ACSI model include India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore,[6] Dubai, Kuwait, South Africa, Honduras,[12] Puerto Rico,[13] and Colombia.