Today’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) results are all over the news for one big reason: Yahoo beat Google in customer satisfaction for the first time since both companies were added to the Index.
Actually, Yahoo’s (79) one-point lead over Google (78) on the ACSI’s 100-point scale isn’t the biggest story here–the bigger deal is that they’re moving in opposite directions. In 2006, Google had an ACSI score of 81 and Yahoo! a score of 76. This year, Google fell three points to 78 and Yahoo gained three points to 79. I attribute this mainly to the fact that to the average user, Google hasn’t changed all that much in the last few years. Sure, they’ve added incredible new functionality and tools like maps, iGoogle, gmail, calendars, etc., but I don’t think the average user who goes to google.com to do a search knows about those new capabilities. And Google doesn’t make them look very obvious. Yahoo, on the other hand, is making changes that are more useful and accessible to the every day user. Yahoo’s increase should be good news for CEO Jerry Yang, since ACSI scores are a proven predictor of financial performance, stock prices, loyalty, and recommend.
The other big news is Ask.com’s huge increase: up 5.6% from 71 to 75. They relaunched without paying the typical price (usually satisfaction scores drop in what we call the “relaunch effect”), which shows they did so with the right mix of evolution and revolution. Their market share is still small, but their satisfaction score has increased 21% and 13 points since they were first measured as AskJeeves.com in 2002, which is a phenomenal gain in such a short time.
AOL fell 9.5% from a 74 to a 67 in this year’s ACSI report. MSN increased marginally from 74 to 75.
The report also measured the top news and information sites, like
ABCNews.com (74), MSNBC.com (74), CNN.com (73), NYTimes.com (73) and
USAToday.com (72).
Get the full report here.
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