Facebook ranks low in customer satisfaction… because it can

Being a phenomenal success is a great thing that relatively few companies enjoy, however, one doesn’t need to satisfy customers to enjoy such success: you simply need to offer them something that they want, really bad, like the social graph. In a recent customer satisfaction survey run by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) which asked 70,000 customers (or users), Facebook was among the 10 companies out of 223 that got a score lower than 65. YouTube for example, got 73.

There are many reasons why users aren’t happier about Facebook, among them: recent privacy concerns, frequent changes of user interface (UI), fear of the commercialization of users private data. At the moment, Facebook has nothing to fear because it is still the largely dominant player in the “real” social graph. Why do we say “real”: because Facebook’s value is simple: people use their *real* identity, which is not the case for the major players like MySpace, Google and so on… as long as they continue to enjoy this position, the answer to every problem will: “because they can”. [link to ACSI report]