(MSNBC.com) Facebook, the most visited site on the Internet , may also be the most despised: A new poll says the site scored 64 on a 100-point scale, which “puts Facebook in the bottom 5 percent” of private sector companies “and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction,” according to results of a survey released today.
The results of the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s E-Business Report, done by the University of Michigan in conjunction with ForeSee Results, comes as Facebook nears 500 million members, and as founder Mark Zuckerberg prepares to take to the airwaves Wednesday to talk about his company and its woes.
“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president of ForeSee Results. “At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.”
The ACSI polls — based on interviews with 70,000 customers annually — historically have measured customer satisfaction with more than 225 brick-and-mortar companies, as well as federal government departments. This is the first time social media sites were measured.
“Social media has become too big to ignore, so we added it to our list of e-business measures,” said Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and professor of business at the University of Michigan. “We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the category defies its popularity.”
Facebook has been under fire much of this year for everything from the ways it shares data to changing the site around so frequently that regular users are confused and frustrated, especially when it comes to privacy settings.
The Federal Trade Commission says it is examining Facebook’s privacy and data collection practices as well as those of other social networks. In Germany, a data protection official said this month he launched legal proceedings against Facebook, alleging the site illegally accesses and saves the personal data of people who don't use the site.
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