500 million users! But what of Facebook's woeful customer satisfaction?
by Steven Mostyn - Jul 22 2010, 11:27
500 million users can't be wrong... or can they? Image: Facebook.
Here at The Tech Herald, we giveth and we taketh away. While we’re happy to applaud Facebook for securing the loyalty of 500 million users around the world, we think it’s only right and proper to wag an accusatory finger at the social network’s poor levels of customer satisfaction.
Granted, the house that Zuckerberg built may well dwarf the likes of fellow online giants such as Yahoo and Wikipedia, but the 2010 American Customer Survey Index (ACSI) has revealed Facebook to be far short of expectations where customer satisfaction is concerned.
Conducted by ForSee Results, the survey awarded Facebook 64 points out of a possible 100, leaving the world’s leading social network lagging at the bottom of the heap when compared to other companies in the social media business category. Only MySpace scored lower with 63 out of 100.
“Facebook scored 64 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, which puts its satisfaction even lower than IRS e-filers,” outlined the survey. “This puts Facebook in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction.”
ForSee Results chief executive officer Larry Freed, in offering up a possible explanation for Facebook’s poor customer satisfaction rating, placed the blame squarely on “privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commmercialization and advertising.”
The newly added social media category was led by online oracle Wikipedia, which scored 77 out of 100, closely followed by Google-owned clip service YouTube, which posted 73 out of 100 on the ACSI scale.
When it comes to the highly competitive online search category, Google continues to lead the way with a satisfaction rating of 80, although that’s a seven percent drop over 2009’s results. It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Bing registered a solid debut score of 77 out of 100.
Other major players in the realm of search include the likes of Yahoo (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).
Comment on this Story