What has been voted the most frustrating website in America?

Comcast hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent months, following the ongoing inquisition into its call centre practices and the fallout from the customer service saga in July.

Now it appears the US public are officially putting the boot in, voting the cable and internet service provider as having the nation’s ‘most frustrating website’, in a poll conducted by AnswerDash.

Mimicking BT in the UK (recent voted as having the UK’s worst hold music and most irritating call centre), by slowly collecting a range of unwanted customer service-related titles, Comcast’s latest award is based on its website’s user experience, including its inability to provide easy guidance and task completion for its customers.  

More than half of AnswerDash’s poll (59%) selected Comcast as having the US’s most frustrating website. CenturyLink.com and IRS.gov made up the bottom three organisations, while Facebook, Amazon and Apple were ranked highest.

Alongside the poll, AnswerDash’s accompanying research also confirmed the issues many brands, particularly ecommerce providers, are having with sparking the imagination of the young generation, by assessing website abandonment rates among different age groups.

It found that with 18-24-year-olds, 75% will abandon a website within two minutes if they cannot find what they need. In contrast, 57% of consumers who are 55-years or older abandon a website in two minutes or less, with 28% indicating that they would spend only 4 minutes trying to accomplish their task on a website before leaving.

“As e-commerce grows, and particularly in the light of the upcoming holiday season, delivering an excellent online user experience is imperative to helping propel consumers along the path to purchase,” said Jake Wobbrock, AnswerDash’s CEO.

“We conducted this survey to provide companies with actionable insights around website usability, and the results are telling. Companies face a huge opportunity to provide an intuitive online experience by including website support tools, such as Contextual FAQs, that reduce abandonment through improved user experience.”

The survey also highlighted a number of key demographic differences with customer service tools, with consumers over 44-years-old nearly 20% more likely to call a company when they cannot find what they need versus younger age groups. Among 18-34-year-olds, only 9% of respondents indicated that the phone was a helpful customer service tool.