There may be no bigger industry than banking that has finally seen the light and understood that customer service is always job number one. For years, banks would talk a good game when it came to wanting their customers to be happy, but didn’t back that up with endeavors that actually made their customers happy. These days, the bigger the bank the harder it works at making sure those who use the bank are happy about using the bank.
This has never been truer when talking about the big four banks in Australia. Roy Morgan Research has announced a new report that shows that the big four banks have all started taking customer service quite a bit more seriously. The only odd side effect is that all four of these organizations taking customer service more seriously has led to all four basically coming together on the customer satisfaction map, rather than one or two clearly taking the lead.
Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, the National Australia Bank and ANZ have all decided that customer centricity is key to their business at about the same time and all four have also taken roughly the same steps to make sure their satisfaction numbers are climbing. All four of these banks have been investing heavily in their IT departments and the results have been big payoffs in customer satisfaction. While there isn’t much of a gap between the four, all the banks can take pride in the fact that overall satisfaction now sits at 82 percent.
Technology, especially mobile applications appears to be one of the biggest driving forces in getting better customer scores. Very few people actually go into a bank these days and the banks that are winning the customer wars are those that allow their users to do more from their smartphone. This is certainly the case with these four, who have put out impressive applications as part of their IT spend the last few years.
There is one group of bank customer that isn’t all that happy, oddly enough. The Roy Morgan report shows that high-value customers are less satisfied than regular customers. This seems to indicate there is a bigger need for personal customer service geared towards this group that hasn’t been carried out yet.
Edited by Alisen Downey