Facebook Flops in National Customer Satisfaction Report

As Facebook readies its celebration plans for reaching its half a billion user milestone, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) shows the social media site is one of the most disliked companies in America.

Facebook scored 64 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, which puts its satisfaction even lower than IRS e-filers. This puts Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two of the lowest scoring industries.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results that partnered with ASCI for the survey, said in a statement.

“At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.”

The study coincided with a precipitous drop in new monthly U.S. Facebook users in June.

ASCI grouped Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in its new category Internet Social Media, measured for the first time in June. ASCI said it did not include Twitter, the microblogging site, because a disproportionate number of users access Twitter through third party applications.

Overall the category scored 70 for customer satisfaction, just below the U.S. Postal Service, wireless providers and tobacco companies.

While some would question the inclusion of crowdsourced encyclopedia site Wikipedia, its score of 77 helped pull the category up from the lows of Facebook (64) and MySpace (63). YouTube scored above the category median at 73.

The measured social media sites all rank in the top ten U.S. trafficked sites with the exception of MySpace at number 13 according to Alexa.

“We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the category defies its popularity," said Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and professor of business at the University of Michigan.

Internet Social Media was one of three categories published in this month’s ASCI E-Business Report. Portals and search engines received a score of 80. Google plunged 7 percent while Bing made its debut at 77, closely followed by Yahoo at 76.

The third category was online news and information where FOX News came in on top at 82, the highest score any news site has ever received in nine years of measurement. MSNBC.com (74) and CNN.com (73) trailed. All major news websites improved over 2009 measures, including newspaper Web sites for USATODAY.com (77) and NYTimes.com (76), both up 4 percent.

ACSI reports scores on a 0-100 scale for 10 economic sectors, 45 industries and more than 225 companies and government agencies. Each company score is based on the views of 250 randomly selected U.S. adults, between the ages of 18 and 84.

The survey includes questions that measure expectations about product quality, recent experience with a product including quality, reliability and value, and whether or not respondents have lodged complaints to the company, and finally, the likelihood of purchasing the product again.

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