Despite the continual high profile negative publicity about the Big Four banks from media and politicians, the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) retains a clear lead among the big four with 81.4 per cent in terms of satisfaction, according to a survey.
Roy Morgan’s Single Source survey found ANZ followed at 79.9 per cent, NAB at 77.9 per cent, and Westpac at 77.6 per cent in August.
While satisfaction with the Big Four remained unchanged in August at 79.7 per cent, their home-loan customer satisfaction dropped 0.9 per cent to 75.9 per cent.
Non-home loan customer satisfaction was up 0.2 per cent to 80.6 per cent. ANZ was the only Big Four bank that showed an improvement in overall satisfaction, up 0.3 per cent. ANZ’s non-home loan customer satisfaction was up 0.6 per cent to 80.6 per cent, while their home-loan customers declined by 1.1 per cent to 78.5 per cent.
CBA’s home-loan customer satisfaction dropped one per cent to 75.9 per cent, and Westpac 1.5 per cent. NAB was the only Big Four bank to show an increase in this segment with an increase of 0.2 per cent.
Roy Morgan Research industry communications director, Norman Morris, said: “Despite the continual high profile negative publicity about banks from the media and politicians, focused primarily on the Big Four, their customer satisfaction remains at historically very high levels”.
“It appears that one of the major negative influences currently affective customer satisfaction across the Big Four is that, despite historically low home loan rates, their home-loan customers all have lower satisfaction levels that other customers,” Morris said.
“This is somewhat surprising considering that their home-loan customers have generally benefited by declining interest rates whereas other customer have generally been disadvantaged by declines in deposit rates.”
Morris said a potential reason for the lower home-loan customer satisfaction was the very high levels of adverse publicity that the Big Four attract when they do not pass on the full interest rate reductions announced by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
“On the positive side, it appears that bank customers are moving over the online banking and are giving these newer channels generally much higher satisfaction scores than for branches,” he said.
