According to a new report out today from ForeSee Results, Facebook and other social media sites ranked surprisingly low in the “American Customer Satisfaction Index” (ASCI). While other sites, including MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia all performed relatively poorly, Facebook fell near the bottom of the report. Also of interest was statistics showing that users of social media sites didn’t use them for product recommendations, and hadn’t purchased anything as a result of the sites. Strangely enough, no comparable survey was performed for other product groups.
The group behind the ASCI report also went as far as to suggest that customer satisfaction index rankings were a good indication of future stock performance. If that’s true, you may want to go buy News Corp’s stock since Fox News ranked higher in customer satisfaction than any other news site. It’s not exactly surprising that Fox News ranks so highly as the company produces information that the viewer base is most interested in hearing.
The report also drew its own conclusions about why Facebook can continue to perform so well despite the “abysmally low customer satisfaction”:
- Facebook is a monopoly - The report claims that Facebook has a monopoly, something I’m personally not so sure about. The report states that “Although there are literally hundreds of social networking sites around the world, [...] there really is no other choice for people wanting to connect with friends, family, and colleagues regardless of interest, age, geographic location, gender, etc.”
- Younger People Don’t Care - According to the report, younger users were “less impacted by the privacy concerns and changes to the interface”. Despite this high satisfaction among younger users, the report suggests that the company will need the support of older users in order to maintain its dominance.
- Most importantly, “customers are willing to suffer through a poor experience in return for the benefits Facebook provides”. This rare scenario is pretty incredible, however people are becoming frustrated with Facebook abusing their power.
If there was anything positive to come of this report about Facebook, it was that MySpace performed lower! Perhaps there should be a trophy somewhere in Facebook’s office which says “we’re better than MySpace”. Then again, many view Facebook as more of a competitor to Google than MySpace, yet with Google’s high customer satisfaction score, it will be difficult for Facebook to compete with the company directly. If you are interested in reading the report, you can go find it here.
Source: All Facebook
Tuesday, July 20, 2010