The recent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) reports that video streaming services have surpassed customer satisfaction of cable and satellite TV. Netflix and other online video services managed to get a score of 76 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale while traditional subscription TV industry maintained its previous score of 62.
According to the ACSI’s annual telecommunications report, customer satisfaction with subscription TV has remained in the mid-to-low 60s and have not recovered enough to compete with online video streaming services since the past six years. Subscription sales even declined by 3 percent to $103.4 billion in 2018.
Consequently, customer satisfaction remains poor due to poor service and accelerating cord cutting. Due to the popularity of video streaming services, a growing number of households have never considered a subscription to pay TV.
Pay-TV and broadband posted an industry average of 62, making it rank last among all 46 industries that are tracked by the ACSI. Customer satisfaction of these two services which are usually bundled together peaked at 63 in 2013 and has never recovered since then.
Leading the video streaming services is no other than Netflix. The report said that although Netflix shares the lead with Sony PlayStation and Amazon’s Twitch last year, it managed to pull ahead with a one percent gain and has become the solo leader across all five telecom categories namely, streaming, pay-TV, broadband, landline phones, and on-demand video.
According to the report, Netflix gained traction due to the numerous original content that it has released at an unprecedented rate. It has ranked at the top for original content among all streaming services as its membership grows exponentially.
While Netflix and other video streaming services have been doing well, the same is not true for some lower-ranked streaming services though, This is due to the fact that these services do not offer services that are different from what original cable and satellite TV offer. These include commercial interruptions abound, high subscription price and poor customer service.
Based on interviews with 38, 681 customers this year, the ACSI telecommunications report interviews 300,000 customers a year for the company to be able to track more than 400 telecommunications companies in 46 industries.
