Facebook Customers Unsatisfied, Bing Satisfaction on the Rise

In the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) (conducted by ForeSee Results), Bing saw a strong rise is satisfaction, though Google remains the search engine with the most satisfied customers. Meanwhile, Facebook was at the bottom of the heap for customer satisfaction.

Bing Catching Up to Google in Customer Satisfaction
Google remains in the top spot for customer satisfaction at 83 percent. This figure is a 4 percent increase from the 2010 results. However, the most dramatic growth this year was seen from the second place search site, Bing, which rose seven percent to 82 percent satisfaction.

It's clear that both Google and Bing's changes are being appreciated by users, but Bing is gaining visibility and reputation.

"Last year, Google's customer satisfaction score was three points higher than Bing's," stated Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results. "This year, that gap narrows to one point. Bing is showing it can challenge Google in terms of revenue, market share, and the customer experience."

Meanwhile, in pure popularity, Bing is also gaining. The Bing-Yahoo Alliance reached over 30 percent of search share in the June comScore report, with Bing growing to 14.4 percent search share. In the same time period, Google stayed stable at 65.5 percent.

Facebook's Weak Satisfaction
Facebook often receives criticism from its more vocal users, targeting anything from interface changes to the company's privacy policy. Apparently these shouts of disdain aren't coming from a small but loud minority. The 2011 ACSI showed that Facebook has the lowest customer satisfaction rating of any social media site: 66 percent.

Sixty-six percent wasn't just the lowest in the category: it was the lowest rating "of all measured companies in this report." Those measured spanned several industries but included only very large companies; even MySpace was excluded this year, having shrunk to a size where "there were not enough users to create a statistically significant sample."

Social media on the whole has a weak average satisfaction, with Wikipedia – the least interactive social media site of the lot – receiving the highest rating in the industry (78 percent). YouTube came in second with a 74 percent satisfaction rating. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook each rose in popularity since last year, and Facebook – which sat at 63 percent satisfaction in 2010 – saw the most dramatic increase in satisfaction.

There's plenty to talk about with Facebook's low satisfaction rating, especially when it comes to Google+. Google is faring well in customer satisfaction; it's possible that the reputation advantage will play as a powerful but often overlooked edge in the battle between Facebook and Google+.