Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Customer satisfaction of the major IM networks...


J.D. Power, long known for its customer satisfaction surveys, has done a satisfaction survey of the major IM networks. The results are somewhat surprising (at least to me). Rankings on a 1000 point scale:

791 - Yahoo! Messenger
782 - MSN Messenger (includes WLM)
766 - Windows Messenger (preinstalled with XP)
762 - Instant Messaging Average
746 - Google Talk
744 - Trillian
743 - AIM/AOL Instant Messenger
Seeing Yahoo! in the top position was unexpected (I would have thought MSN), but it is also interesting how tightly grouped the rankings are. With a standard deviation of only 20 points, I wonder what the margin of error for the survey is. Also note the absence of ICQ and Skype.

Nevertheless, as we move toward a world with IM interoperability, customer satisfaction becomes much more important, since users will be able to choose the IM network they want to use. The eventual winners will be the networks that focus on the end-users, rather than short-term monetization.

The survey also reported these interesting factoids:
  • The percentage of Internet users who use IM on a daily basis, 36%, was essentially unchanged from 2005, while text messaging usage continued to grow.
  • IM replaced the use of traditional phones, to some degree, for almost 70% of IM users.
You can read more details on the survey at BigBlueBall.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow man... U've teamed up with the Gods... I'd love to join them as a developer... But i seriously dunno when i'd get the opportunity.... :(

Anonymous said...

I am not entirely suprised Yahoo is ahead of MSN. MSN is a rather ugly program. It is gaudy, takes up too much screen real estate and is bloated. Yahoo, sure, is similar somewhat, but it is a lot cleaner in appearance (except for their addition of adds).

Google Talk, biased of course, is still my favorite because it has such a cleaner look and feel to it. Most the rest (other than Trillian) do not have this.

Anonymous said...

Hello!
My first post here...
I'm from Rio de Janeiro - Brazil.
First congratulations for the great job.
and i want to post how i miss ICQ =) i loved it so much =D to me is the best ever! but today nobody have the program people forgot it.

See you! bye

Nathan said...

It's also disappointing that IRC and ICB always get left out. They've been around for decades.