E-business customer satisfaction is moving up--slowly

Overall customer satisfaction with the e-business industry has improved, but still lags customer satisfaction levels of all industries, the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index from ForeSee Results Inc. shows. Customers gave e-business a score of 71.4 on a 100-point scale in the latest report. While the score is up from 68.7 a year ago, it still trails all industries’ score of 73.8. It’s even farther behind consumers’ rating of e-commerce, which received a 77.6 in a report released in February.

One of the leaders in e-business customer satisfaction is Google, which earned a customer satisfaction score of 83. With that score, it also dominates the online search category, where the next highest score was for Ask Jeeves, which rated a 69. Alta Vista scored a 63. ForeSee notes that Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista both trailed the “all other” category of search engines, in which the remaining engines earned a collective 78--“ a strong score that bears watching,” ForeSee said.

"Google`s score is more than enough to dominate the search engine field," said ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed. "In fact, their score shows they have one of the strongest relationships with their customers of any kind of company, online or offline. What`s remarkable is that they are not leaving their customers behind while they continue to evolve their business model. That`s a tough balancing act-and they`re not just maintaining the strength of the customer asset, they are actually improving it from year to year."

Among portals, AOL made a six-point jump in performance to 65, “barely a low pass but an impressive leap in the right direction,” ForeSee said. Yahoo remains the dominant player in the category at 78, with a two-point improvement over last year. MSN also moved up two points to 74. The average of other, smaller players measured as part of the ACSI sample is 78. "AOL`s improvement is very, very impressive," said Freed. "People have said AOL was down for the count before and have been proved wrong. If AOL can keep this up, that company may prove once again how capable and resilient it really is. They said they were going to re-focus on customers and it looks like that was much more than lip service. "

The American Customer Satisfaction Index is designed to be a scientific measure of customer satisfaction with results not based on self-reported feedback or remembered actions.

“Google and Yahoo have scores that place them among the best performers of any of the roughly 200 top companies the ACSI measures on an annual basis,” ForeSee said.