Bigger not better: Google, Apple dive in customer satisfaction; Yahoo gains

Who knew? Well, Joe Average knew, but until now wasn't saying. The American Customer Satisfaction Index for the second quarter was released Tuesday and the brief recap goes like this: Apple is still the top dog in customer satisfaction in the PC market, but is slipping. Yahoo is topping Google. And overall satisfaction is flat.

According to the ACSI, which is released by the University of Michigan, overall satisfaction is 75.3 on a 100-point scale. That’s up 1 percent from a year ago.

Some key points broken out in the ACSI release (all figures are compared to the second quarter a year ago):

* PC customer satisfaction falls 3 percent to 75. Most of that decline came from Dell and Apple, which both saw customer satisfaction fall 5 percent. Apple is still leader of the pack with a score of 79. Dell has a score of 74. HP is at 76, but its Compaq division has a score of 73.

* On the portal front (see chart, Techmeme) Yahoo improved 4 percent to 79 to top Google. The ACSI attributed this improvement to design improvements. Google falls 4 percent to 78. Ask.com’s score was up 6 percent to 75. MSN had a score of 75. AOL had the worst score at 67.

* Among news sources online, MSNBC and ABCNews.com had scores of 74 each, up from 72 and 73 respectively. CNN slipped to 73 from 74 and USA Today slipped to 72 from 74. The New York Times rose to 73 from 72. The “all other” category surged to 77 from 74.

* The score for overall electronics improved to 83 from 80. Unfortunately, scores for individual electronics companies such as Sony weren’t available.

In general, the bigger a company gets the harder it is to maintain customer satisfaction. That explains the Google and Apple dip–the more customers you have the more people can be annoyed. For instance, Toyota’s score fell to 84 in the second quarter from 87 in the same quarter a year ago. Toyota’s score got whacked, but portals and PC makers would be more than happy with that tally.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5940