Customer Satisfaction Online | The Digital Clicks Blog
The ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) report for 2011 was recently released by analytics firm ForeSee. The report takes several factors into account and presents a satisfaction score for all the major sites on the web. What the results indicate is that some of the biggest names online need to step up their game if they want to remain on top. Reports like this are hugely important for an Internet marketing consultant who wants to stay fully knowledgeable and up-to-date on which social sites and search engines are the most effective for their services. Facebook, the powerhouse of the social web, is the lowest-scoring of all social networks. Not only that, but it is also the lowest-scoring of all the websites analysed. This practically leaves the door wide open for Google to do what they do best and deliver a service with maximum customer satisfaction. This will be where Google+ can make its mark against Facebook in the battle for social networking supremacy. Wikipedia takes the top spot for social media with 78%, and YouTube is their runner-up with 74% satisfaction. Social media old-timer Myspace has now been dropped from the study due to there not being enough users to create a valid sample. While social media is one of the most popular platforms being used on the Internet, it is surprisingly the lowest scoring of all the groups analysed in the results. What this suggests is that social media still has a long way to go, but now that the service providers have an incentive to improve their customer satisfaction, it has the potential to become a far more effective service than it already is, and the future possibilities for SMO could be huge. As one might predict, Google tops the charts for search engine satisfaction with a 4% rise that now sets it at 83%. Surprisingly, Bing is close behind after a 7% increase since the previous year raised their score to 82%. What this tells us is that, while Google remains the search giant, Bing is a good service that people enjoy using, and it won’t go down without a fight. Keep this in mind with the fact that Bing and Yahoo, taking their recent alliance into account, now have a combined market share of over 30%. It’s clear from this that these services are definite contenders in the search engine game, and it would therefore be wise to give them just as much attention as Google when doing SEO. What you can take from this is that, with the new threat of Google+ looming like a black cloud, Facebook must make massive improvements to satisfaction if they want to last more than a couple more years. On a similar note, the search engine underdog Bing has a fighting chance to make a mark on web giant Google, which would be foolish to ignore Bing and Yahoo’s advances. From an online marketing perspective, these results give an impression of how customers might change their activity and usage for different sites, and they can be used to predict how strategies should be adapted for better results in the future.