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Facebook User Satisfaction Is 'Abysmal'
adeelarshad82 writes "American Customer Satisfaction Index recently conducted a survey in which they found that even though Facebook is gaining popularity, they are doing a miserable job of keeping their users satisfied. According to the survey Facebook scored 64 out of 100 for customer satisfaction, which puts the website in line with the satisfaction rates for airlines and cable companies. The survey also includes other websites like YouTube and Wikipedia (which scored considerably higher) and MySpace, which came in slightly lower. (The survey did not include Twitter since many of its members access the site through third-party sites rather than Twitter.com.) The ACSI was founded at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and is based on annual interviews with about 70,000 customers. The group has measured portals and search engines in the past, as well as news and information websites, but this is the first year the ACSI included social networking sites." UM professor Claes Fornell blogged: "Controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization have positioned the big social networking sites at satisfaction levels well below other Web sites..."
Whether the users are happy or not doesn't mean squat to Facebook because their users aren't their customers. It's the happiness of their advertisers and those who purchase the data that Facebook continually mines that matters to them.
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Or publicizes information that you specifically told them to keep private.
Technoli
For something that's free, people sure do get enraged when it changes in the slightest, or has bugs, or decides to try to profit from the information that people love to dump on it.
It's an equal exchange. Facebook as a corporation would go out of business in a hurry if not for its users. The users are doing their part. Facebook is failing to do theirs in a way that satisfies the very users who make its existence possible. It's perfectly legitimate to raise an objection about this.
You're essentially saying "shut up and take what you're given" as though Facebook were a charity. They absolutely are not, and it's intellectually dishonest to speak about them as though they were.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Actually, the problem is that like the cable industry, *Facebook* acts like it has a sense of entitlement. Once they had a critical mass and growth rate, they decided they could shit all over their users and the users wouldn't defect, leaving plenty of eyeballs to advertise to and freeing them to engage in short-term profit-maximizing behavior.
Sadly, many of these dissatisfied users keep using Facebook even though they know it sucks and they hate it.
Is facebook just the least abysmal compared to all the other competitors and non-competitors.
Bingo. Ding-ding-ding! Give the man a cookie, he's hit the nail on the head.
Facebook sucks the least of any site offering the service they offer. That's the key to their success.
Don't like it. Start your own site.
Oh, no! And you were on a roll! Well, we have some lovely consolation prizes. Thanks so much for playing. :)
Not really a practical answer. In order to have a social site, you have to have the opportunity to socialize. Facebook was the earliest contender to have a site that didn't blow big stinky steaming monkey chunks, and therefore most of the social site fans are already there and pretty entrenched.
To unseat Facebook, you're going to have to build something so fantastic, so compelling, so supremely awesome that people are going to want to move en masse. That way, your new users have a chance at having at least a little bit of a friend network when they arrive.
And since most of Facebook's money comes from targeted advertising, any serious contender is either going to have the same privacy issues and ruin most of the incentive to leave Facebook, charge a membership fee and alienate users that way, or run the site out of the goodness of their hearts to the tune of millions of dollars of losses a year.
The same was said of AOL - they were the first to make a compelling case for that newfangled Internet thingy to the masses, and they were the BIG player back when the Internet was young, and a connection was on the other side of a dialup modem. Facebook is the same "training wheels to social sites" that AOL was the "training wheels to the Internet" back then.
AOL was eventually unseated, and Facebook will be, too. But probably not in the next couple of years. There's little profitable incentive to unseat them and do so in such a way that people would actually want to leave Facebook.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Why?
I fully understand the risks of putting anything online, in particular at a social networking site. Most of us here do. We are not typical of the average person using technology or the internet. Beyond simply protecting grandma and teenagers from their themselves, I still ask why it must be unrealistic to assume FB (or any social networking site) to keep their promises.
I don't have a comprehensive change log of FB's EULA or interface, but the bottom line is they keep changing it at whim. Companies want a EULA to have the strength of a full contract, but it works both ways. They can't just alter the terms and expect it to stick
As an example, credit card companies like to change terms often. The notice they send, however, clearly states that a card holder may opt out and stick with the current terms. Their card will remain valid until the expiration date under the current contract terms. Facebook does not do this. I might have placed a photo with privacy settings such that only my family members can see it. They later make a sweeping change to open that photo to third-party apps or the public at large. This is the real problem with Facebook.
If they made that change with a notice that let you opt-out, or delete all previous data that was set to be private, people would probably have a much better opinion of them. Of course, that also might make people aware of how much they're really putting out there, and Facebook would rather they didn't think about it.
"Customer Satisfaction" for Facebook is measured in click-throughs and sales dollars... not in user complaints.
You and I are not customers to Facebook. We're the product. We're what they're selling - our eyeballs are being sold to the advertisers. Their only reason to make you happy is to ensure you come back (begrudgingly or not).
Once you realize that, their lack of "customer service" isn't surprising in the least. So long as you're not paying for the service, you're not a customer. They care very little about your privacy, your experience, the impact that their constant site layout changes and privacy policies have on you, the annoyance if/when they sell your personal data to mailing lists and spammers - so long as it all suits the needs of their true customers and doesn't piss you off enough that you don't keep coming back. This is the way of business... get used to it unless you want to pay for these things.
MadCow.
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