Twitter Comes Bottom While Google Maintains Lead in Yearly Customer Experience Report

The success of paid or organic advertising on social platforms and search engines rests on your target audience using, and more importantly, enjoying the platforms.

The lower the user experience, the potential for less time being spent scrolling or searching, resulting in a reduced chance of your ads, organic posts or links being clicked.

The ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) has released its annual report, and while there are some rankings you would expect, others may be a little surprising.

The ACSI 2020-2021 Report

The e-business study looks at customer satisfaction benchmarks covering three categories:

• Search engines and information
• Social media
• News and opinion

The data consists of interviews of 5,544 randomly selected customers who gave feedback on their recent experiences with brands within these categories.

The results are then compared with the previous year’s study to ascertain whether customer satisfaction is growing, declining, or hasn’t changed.

Customer Experience Results Of Internet Social Media

Customer experience benchmarks for the internet social media part of the study were:

• Quality of mobile app.
• Reliability of mobile app.
• Ease of using the site on different devices.
• Site performance.
• Ease of navigation.
• Speed and reliability of video clips.
• Variety of services and information.
• Freshness of content.
• Ease of uploading and editing photos and videos.
• Relevance of content.
• Amount of ads on site.
• Privacy.

The highest-ranking brand is Pinterest, which gained a 1% increase in sentiment, now with a score of 78 out of 100. YouTube came in second with a score of 76 out of 100.

Sentiment for Wikipedia, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram fell by 3%, now with scores of 73, 70, 62, and 69 respectively.

The largest drop in customer experience was Twitter, which fell by 10% and took the last place with a score of 61 out of 100.

Twitter has recently been experimenting with the platform to improve experience for users and shoppers.

Customer Experience Results Of Internet Search Engines and Information

Benchmarks for the internet search engines and information section of the ASCI study were:

• Quality of mobile app.
• Reliability of mobile app.
• Ease of navigation.
• Site performance.
• Ease of using the site on different devices.
• Freshness of content.
• Variety of services and information.
• Speed and reliability of video clips.
• Amount of ads on site.

Expectedly, Google maintained its lead with a score of 76 out of 100; however, customer experience neither rose nor fell.

Other brands such as Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN, answers.com all rose by 1%. Should this continue, Google may find it has competition down the line.

The only brand with a lower score compared to the previous year was AOL, which fell by 3% to 69 out of 100.

Customer Experience Results Of Internet News and Opinion

The final section of the study covered the following benchmarks:

• Quality of app.
• Reliability of mobile app.
• Freshness of content.
• Site performance.
• Ease of navigation.
• Ease of using the site on different devices.
• Variety of services and information.
• Speed and reliability of video clips.
• Amount of ads on site.

The highest score was for the ‘all others’ category.

Even with a score 4% lower than the previous year, FOXNews.com maintained its solo top position, drawing with USATODAY.com, which rose by 1% with a score of 72.

Customer experience on HuffPost increased by 3%, the largest gain in its category; however, the increase wasn’t enough to raise the brand any higher than fifth place out of eight.

ABCNews.com fell to the last place with a score of 69 out of 100.

Get the full report here: ACSI E-Business Study 2020-2021
Source: ACSI Press Release