Slashdot Mirror
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..."
A new report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has put Facebook just above the taxman on America's lists. Out of 30 online companies, the two absolute worst were MySpace with 63 out of 100 and Facebook at 64 but other high scoring sites included Wikipedia (77) and YouTube (73). Unsurprisingly the report reveals that of the 233 companies they monitor year round, MySpace and Facebook are in the bottom 5% for customer satisfaction. That puts them with airlines and cable companies--two historically low ranked industries of customer satisfaction. You can see a brief overview of the scores and also note that on search engines, Bing hits 77 just behind Google at 80 for customer satisfaction. The full report with an overview of why consumers were satisfied or dissatisfied with each site can be found here in PDF.
Seriously, MySpace and Facebook are down there with cable companies and airlines. And their service is (on the surface) free. Must be doing a terrible job.
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..."
Oh, if only it ended there--he missed news feed control problems, advertising, spam, navigation issues and annoying applications. From the actual report:
When asked what they like least about Facebook, survey respondents gave answers including privacy and security concerns, the technology that controls the news feeds, advertising, the constant and unpredictable interface changes, spam, navigation troubles, annoying applications with constant notifications, and functionality, to name a few. There is no shortage of complaints about Facebook.
My work here is dung.
If the user's ever satisfied, he'll stop clicking. Keeping satisfaction one click away seems to be Facebook's entire business model.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
does that include those who are dissatisfied because their parents added them as a friend?
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.
And, as a developer, I can say that their API is buggy and very poorly documented, by far the worst of any of the social networking or photo sharing sites I've worked with. My daughter reports that available iPhone/iPad apps are terrible, too.
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
And yet EVERYONE uses it anyway. They must like something about it. I think it's great. Of course I don't run ANY apps and I use Adblock.
Right, the same report says:
However, according to July 2010 Hitwise data, Facebook is the number one website in the country, with 9% of all website visits (Google has 7.4% and Yahoo! 3.8%) and 55% of all social media visits. Facebook’s market dominance in the U.S. and around the world is indisputable. How can it be so popular if people dislike it so much?
They go on to point out Facebook's monopoly and its popularity being more with younger people while older people complain about it the most. There's little loyalty but it acts as a storehouse for existing videos and pictures well. Then I think this is the most telling piece of this paradox:
Customers are willing to suffer through a poor experience in return for the benefits Facebook provides. This is a rare scenario in the American economy: usually customer satisfaction is intertwined with market success. The few exceptions to this rule (airlines, cable companies, and fast food) are operating in a sphere where there are no true standouts, so the bar is low. Should MySpace stage a comeback, or should any other competitor to Facebook deliver a truly superior customer experience, Facebook should have cause for concern. Right now, only Wikipedia and YouTube surpass Facebook in terms of customer satisfaction, and they are not in direct competition.
Interesting stuff to consider for social sites. If Facebook users are so unhappy, could you build a better Facebook that grabs their images and videos off of Facebook and moves their friend network for them? I don't think Facebook would stand for it long but it's interesting to consider.
My work here is dung.
Hey!
Twitter has 5 8's reliability.
That is only 1 less than the 5 9's that people keep raving about!
You get what you pay for
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
"Customer satisfaction is a thing of the past. They should get over it."
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
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.
Facebook is basically a monopoly in this space. No matter what the satisfaction rating, people will continue to use it, sometimes all freaking day. I would love to have a business "failing" this badly.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I've been a FaceBook member for over a year now, and I haven't gotten laid even once!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This is a tangential rant, but I hate the way both of those links present the data. For some reason most journalists and even bloggers feel the need to "digest" data by putting it into paragraph prose, as if this makes it easier to understand. In many cases, it doesn't. TFA and the linked blog end up spending many, many sentences listing a bunch of numbers, which turns into a confusing narrative. What would be far more useful is a table or list of sites, along with their scores, put in order. They can highlight the entries they think are particularly interesting (e.g. Facebook), while allowing the reader to peruse the list and gain an immediate appreciation for the trends. They can then spend their sentences describing the context and meaning of the data, rather than just repeating numbers.
I see this time and again in news reports: they list statistics and numbers that they are clearly reading off of a list or graph, but don't let us actually see the graph! I appreciate that I may be more technically-minded than most, and may be more comfortable with graphs and ordered datasets than the average news reader. However I think anyone smart/educated enough to understand the point being made in a paragraph of statistics is better served by a simple and clean (but accurate) graph or ordered list.
People are stupid. Their opinions are stupid and lousy indicators of a product's quality. YouTube users are more satisfied? Have you seen the user comments on YouTube? Have you ever been able to find something you need on YouTube hidden amongst the millions of complete time-waster outlets for any idiot with a camera?
People who like their stuff like their stuff, regardless of how good or bad it really is. Saying Facebook has bad user satisfaction is a byproduct of populist group-think: "I heard something about Facebook giving out my private information (that I willingly host on the Internet)...damn those bastards! But I'm not giving up my Facebook because it's too important to me!".
Seriously, if it so abysmal, stop using it. Not enough people have that sort of character, though. It's too easy to bitch about things without actually doing anything about it.
The point isn't that people post less than accurate pictures (though they do), the point is that crazy stalkers will track you down for a "surprise hookup". Fortunately, you can make the slashdot idle section if you update your facebook status to "is being raped by a crazy stalker".
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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."
"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.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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.
Nonsense. Facebooks customers are it's users. You piss off the users too much and you lose their traffic. Lose the traffic and you lose your ad revenue.
Bottom line it is in the best interest of Facebook to please its user base.