Q: Why wouldn't a company always choose to work in the area where there is the highest impact on customer satisfaction?
Improvement efforts must always be weighed against several criteria, one of which is cost. Companies need to balance the cost of each improvement against the gain in satisfaction and financial performance that will occur if that improvement is implemented.   The marginal cost of improvement typically increases with higher scores, so improvement in a high score/high impact item may not yield positive ROI.  The gain in satisfaction and profit may not offset the expense required to realize that gain. 

Q: How do I effectively boil all the information down for my executives?
Though there is complex mathematics behind the scenes, it is relatively easy to communicate results to high-level audiences. There are two pieces of vital, basic information that should come from any good customer satisfaction measurement program: (1) How well or poorly the company is performing on the various aspects of its customers' interaction with the firm, and (2) Where is it more relevant to our customers that we change that performance. The combination of these two forms the nucleus for strategic and tactical actions in any company, answering the questions "how are we doing?" and "where does performance really matter?"

Q: What is the typical lag time for CSI after improvements in the upstream measures impacting it?
Because CSI and its components are measured independently, they may not move together within the same time periods. CSI is an "overall" measure and encompasses not only recent experiences, but the cumulative impact of actions that have happened over the course of the relationship between the company and its customer. Results also show that improvements in areas that are easily quantifiable by the customer (price, hours of operation, speed of service, etc.) will impact CSI more quickly than improvements in "softer" areas (customer service, reliability of product/service, account representative, etc.). Because of this, the overall CSI measure sometimes "lags" the improvements companies make and even improvements in the specific scores that were the genesis of the improvement initiatives.