If you looked at some of the digg comments left during our Yahoo! week, you would believe that Yahoo! has a real problem brewing with customer service.
“Yahoo is an extremely arrogant company that does not place the slightest bit of value on its customers.” — peganjr
“yahoo lacks customer support” — noctu
“I’ll never forgive yahoo for deleteing [sic] my email account of 8 years. Bastards.” — andrewcsayer
Some users appeared to have a such a strong dislike of Yahoo!’s customer support that they commented multiple times on nearly every one of our dugg stories that week. But the latest University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index data paints a much different picture.
For the first time in the history of the report, according to Reuters, Yahoo! topped Google scoring a 79 out of 100 and just edging out Google’s 78. Yahoo!’s marks rose 3.9% year-over-year, while Google saw its consumer satisfaction fall 3.7% according to the study. Yahoo! scored the highest among the top search/portal properties.
According to Larry Freed, whose ForeSee Results sponsored the survey, consumers look for year-to-year improvements, and Google has not changed much over the past few years from the standpoint of the average consumer. While readers of a blog like this one are likely on top of every new application Google has launched, or changes they have made to current offerings, they have not done enough to draw attention to those changes from mainstream users, Freed told Reuters.
“Google needs to figure out a way to take advantage of those great applications they’ve developed. Not necessarily through advertising, but better marketing.”
Microsoft and Ask also had strong showings, scoring 75/100 each. Ask was perhaps the biggest surprise of the study, showing the largest gain in user satisfaction over last year, up 5.6%. This is perhaps the first evidence of their relaunch strategy and marketing campaigns paying off. While they haven’t done much to make a dent in Google’s search dominance, this study indicates that at least users are finding a better experience using Ask services.
AOL, on the other hand, was down a whopping 9% to 67/100. According to Reuters, that score was only slightly higher than the US Internal Revenue Service. That’s can’t be good news for AOL.
