BUSINESS WIRE — Feb 14 — Yahoo! Personals, Match.com and True.com provided the best search functionality and dating information, earning the highest customer experience rankings. Yahoo! Personals, AmericanSingles and eHarmony ranked highest among prospective customers. The Keynote Customer Experience Rankings are based on research with 2,000 customers and 2,000 prospective customers using American Singles, Black Planet, eHarmony, Friend Finder, Friendster, Lavalife, Match.com, PerfectMatch, Tickle, True and Yahoo! Personals. "Consumer satisfaction with online dating sites is considerably lower than satisfaction levels seen with other online services. However, these diminished satisfaction levels are driven primarily by the personal expectations of the customer and their interaction with other members," said Dr. Bonny Brown. The best sites were well organized and easy to use. Poorer sites were cluttered with ads or heavy text. 83% of start at a search engine. A clear advantage for Yahoo! Personals; 40% started at Yahoo. eHarmony was the most common destination for Google searchers. 50% of customers expressed interest in personality tests, 50% in physical attraction testing. 45% interested in background checks. 30% of online dating service customers in the study were married or living with a significant other/partner! Tickle is considered the "fun" site; 73% described the site that way. Yahoo! Personals is considered the "friendly" site (76%), and True is the "safe" site (69%).
Mark Brooks: How did Keynote end up with a sample set containing 30% non-singles?
I am not surprised by that seemingly high percentage. Industry surveys have shown that many marrieds have always used online dating and that many online daters assume that threat exists. Again, contrary to the assertions of some bloggers and some of the major players, it seems that customers do want the industry to embrace safety measures above and beyond the “common sense” tips the big players merely serve up time and again.
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To enhance a user’s online experience within Social Networking sites, companies can make the move towards “Web 2.0” by giving their customers richer features that allow them to find other users within a geographic location (City, State, Country, Zip Code, Area Code, etc) that share the same interests (dating, family, sports, etc). To enable this, social networking sites can use data from Meridian World Data, http://www.meridianworlddata.com. They offer a full line of comprehensive databases that contain Longitude and Latitude for global cities which companies can use in their website for such services. See the growing list of social networking customers at http://www.meridianworlddata.com/Customer-List.asp#OnlineDating . You can reach Meridian World Data at 1-800-388-5287 or via email at info@MeridianWorldData.com. You can see the entire list of geographic products at http://www.meridianworlddata.com/Products.asp