American Society for Quality Releases Quarterly Index

The American Society for Quality released this week a massive survey which indicates a customer satisfaction for services has been in constant decline over the past decade.  While some consumer goods such as soft drinks, food, and beer recieved high marks, other goods such as airlines, resaurants and cellular service are seeing rapidly declining customer satisfaction ratings.  The study, which covers an wide variety of service related goods and services, also highlights some industries with significant satisfaction increases.  Yahoo Finance Reports:

The life insurance industry realized the greatest gain over the last 10 years, with an increase of 2.7% in customer perceived quality. This is likely the result of a well-defined process of interacting with customers after the initial policy sale.

Hotels have one of the highest perceived-quality scores for the service industry, showing gains in both perceived quality and value over the last decade. During that time, several hotel chains have implemented major quality improvement efforts. For example, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which registered a 7.1% gain, implemented Six Sigma extensively throughout the organization.