Yahoo, Ask, MSN Up In Customer Satisfaction As Google, AOL Slip
- by Tameka Kee , August 14, 2007
Also, Ask.com rose four points to 75 and MSN.com one point, also to 75--while AOL's customer satisfaction slipped 10% to an industry low score of 67, down seven points from 2006.
The ACSI grouped search engines and portals together this year, as both Web entities have made "trying to own [consumer] navigation on the Web" their primary goal, said Larry Freed, online satisfaction expert, CEO and president of ACSI report sponsor ForeSee Results. The report compiled data from telephone surveys on factors like service expectations, perceived brand quality, loyalty and complaints.
While gains and losses of less than five points on a 100-point scale may seem insignificant, customer satisfaction with the e-business sector as a whole (which ACSI defines as search/portal sites and news/info sites) slipped this year for the first time, falling from 76.5 to 75.2, just slightly lower than the ACSI national average (76.3) across all industries.
This decline stems from customers rating the overall quality of e-business sites lower than previously, according to Freed, and due to recent innovations like street-level maps and social networking being geared primarily at the "most tech-savvy users" and not necessarily the population at large.
So Google's Universal Search, despite the industry attention it received, didn't have a marked impact on the overall user experience. That's a characteristic the search giant actually prides itself on, but one that may have undermined its perceived value in the eyes of consumers.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, "Yahoo's three-point increase is definitely significant. It shows that people are more satisfied with what they're offering," said Freed. "And the more satisfied they are, the more likely they are to come back to the site--and often." That means more available eyeballs for advertisers, which could herald better revenue.
IAC's Ask.com clearly understands customer satisfaction, as the site jumped four points to 75 in the face of significant cosmetic and technological changes. "The company saw no negative downturn in the change from AskJeeves to Ask," said Freed. "There was no major change in the user navigation, and even the new three-pane interface is pretty clean and simple. They also still manage to promote features like city search at the same time."
Ask's ability to increase customer satisfaction while transforming its offering bodes well for the search engine, according to the ACSI report, which historically finds a "proven link between ACSI scores and financial performance."
While Ask.com's share of the search market is nowhere near Google's, the site has consistently "held its own," said Freed--even as Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have all given up share. "If Ask continues to innovate, they could feasibly gain a half point or point of market share--which could be a huge benefit financially."
AOL, on the other hand, has not fared well in its transitional phase--as customer satisfaction dropped seven points this year to 67--the only Web site to score below 70 in the survey. Customer confusion in the wake of the Web portal's shift from a subscription to ad-supported model contributed to the almost 10% drop in overall satisfaction.
Meanwhile MSN.com gained one point to reach a satisfaction score of 75. Still, the search division of Microsoft seems unable to differentiate itself from the pack--as its score has held fairly steady at 74 or 75 for the past five years. In the report, Freed noted that MSN "probably won't be able to maintain a consistent customer satisfaction score like this for much longer" without offering a unique value proposition--one that doesn't include paying consumers for the use of its search engine.
