14 DAY TRIAL // Google managed to come on top of the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures consumer satisfaction across various business areas and product categories.
The recently released report regards online businesses, covering social media, search engines and online news and opinions websites.
Search engines, as a whole, jumped 5.3 percent in customer satisfaction, reaching an overall score of 80, mostly thanks to Google. The world’s largest Internet company surged 8 percent to an ACSI score of 83.
“A sharp increase in search engine advertising contributed to a drop in user satisfaction last year, but Google’s latest change to the way ads are labeled, along with its focus on the mobile user experience, may be steps in the right direction,” says VanAmburg, director of the ACSI.
In fact, Google has had some of the most satisfied customers in all of the domains analyzed by the report, making VanAmburg state that it is unlikely for the competition to dislodge Google’s very loyal customer base.
Microsoft’s Bing came in second, with a score of 73, down nearly 4 percent since last year. MSN followed behind, with the same score, but with a smaller year-over-year decrease than the other Microsoft product.
Yahoo ranked next with a score of 71, continuing on a downward path. On 2012, Yahoo managed to get a score of 78, and last year one of 76. Compared to last year, Yahoo dropped 6.6 percent in the American Customer Satisfaction report.
Social media companies ranked among the worst-performing companies tracked by the ACSI, but overall, the category improved compared to last year.
Facebook and LinkedIn managed to gain some points in the customer satisfaction report, but they’re still the worst in the industry, customers say.
“Facebook gains 8 percent to 67, but the rise in satisfaction precedes the news that the social networking giant manipulated the news feeds of half a million users as part of a psychological experiment. LinkedIn also jumps 8 percent to an ACSI score of 67—the site’s highest to date—but continues to lag all except Facebook. Twitter reaches a new high as well, up 6 percent to 69, as users respond positively to its updated site design and enhanced integration of photos and videos,” the report notes.
The mention of the controversial study conducted by Facebook a couple of years ago is quite interesting, indicating that the specialists over at ACSI believe that this will somehow influence the results in the future.