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..."

Comments

That's good right?

[Hatta]

If the user's ever satisfied, he'll stop clicking. Keeping satisfaction one click away seems to be Facebook's entire business model.

Re:That's good right?

[Voyager529]

The issue is that in the good ol' days, there was much less lock-in. To a certain extent, that's true as well. If a waitress is rude to me at Applebees, I won't eat there anymore. If a can of soup is not to my liking, I'll purchase a different brand. If my web hosting company treats me poorly, I'll switch to another provider. In these cases, one pays directly for a service with no intertia to overcome.

By contrast, Facebook is where all of my friends are. Its private messaging function has largely replaced personal e-mail. My cell phone integrates seamlessly with Facebook and automatically updates their status, their photo, and their birthday in my calendar (as well as any events that I RSVP as attending). There are people with whom the only method of communication I have with them is through Facebook.

In Facebook's defense, they solved a LOT of problems that Myspace had in its heydey. From simple things like requiring real names instead of handles to display to people ('cuz x0x0LaTiNaLoVeRx0x with a picture of a palm tree makes perfect sense to me), to issues with spam (I constantly got friend requests and messages from "18 and have a webcam" chiqs, rare if ever on FB), to not allowing custom HTML (have you seen some of the God-awful crap that people cut-and-pasted together? half the pages there took forever to load and looked like someone swalllowed all of Geocities and Xanga and vomited it onto a web server) to just a general community shift from being who you want people to think you are and begging for comments to just putting out there who you are and not having arguments over whether you're in someone's top 8 or not. It was really only a matter of time before the holes in Facebook's systems were exploited.

Privacy issues are just inherent with giving a company - be it Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or whoever - the amount of personal data a typical Facebook page contains. I wonder how many people complaining about the security being slowly relaxed over time have actually made specifications as to what they want, or whether they have their own profiles on the defaults.

The thing that irks me the most about Facebook with regards to privacy was how they defaulted to making your info available to basically everyone. Targeted ads within Facebook are one thing - bandwidth isn't free, and neither is hard disk space. I, for one, don't mind targeted ads. I'd much rather see an ad for the new Above and Beyond album than for Kotex. I do have an issue when I post a status update regarding owning an HTC phone, and suddenly half the banner ads on the websites I visit thereafter involve the latest HTC gear. That's just plain creepy, and yes, I turned it off once I realized that it was there.

In summary, having users come back when they're happy is still accurate, except in cases when there is lock-in (cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Facebook accounts, heck even MS Windows [for those of us with substantial hardware/software investments]). By its nature, Facebook will remain the de facto standard for social networking until they both royally screw up AND have a viable competitor ready to catch their fall.

well firts thoughts...

[eexaa]

It took around 10 seconds to shoot down standard army targetting dummy.

If the laser tower can target the pilot in classical manned aircraft (and I bet it can), it's done in less than a second, even from quite far away.

In result, aircraft with any tranlucent windows seem totally unusuable for combat now.

Human nature strikes again

[Haxx]

  Facebook allows you to communicate with almost anyone you have ever known, for free. Yeah screw them, they suck. This article is all over the web and it is worthless and meaningless.