Negative publicity engulfing the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has done nothing to deter customer satisfaction ratings, with the bank seeing the greatest increase in satisfaction in the last 12 months.
Data from Roy Morgan revealed CBA’s satisfaction rating currently sits on 81.7 per cent and in the top spot amongst the big four, despite a 0.8 per cent decline.
While customer satisfaction with the big four banks continues at high recorded levels around the 80 per cent mark, it has shown some weakness, down 1.4 per cent over the last 12 months.
Satisfaction with ANZ remained unchanged in May and has recorded the most stable level of customer satisfaction over the last decade.
National Australia Bank (NAB) has taken the biggest slide in the last two years from the top of the pile to the bottom, down 3.3 per cent for the year, mostly due to a drop in home-loan satisfaction.
Westpac remained stabled and was down 2.1 per cent total for the year and continues to sit in second place behind CBA.
In addition to measuring overall customer satisfaction, Roy Morgan Research also measures satisfaction of customer dealings and interactions. Data shows that all four banks have shown declines in satisfaction in the five major channels for tracking this, including branch banking, advisers, phone banking, internet baking and mobile banking.
Despite mobile and internet banking having the highest overall satisfaction rating, they too have seen a decline over the past year. Branch banking has taken the biggest dive, with satisfaction dropping to 85.1 per cent, a decline of 3.5 per cent.
Regardless of the findings, Roy Morgan industry communications director, Norman Morris, said that advocacy was an important part of the calculation and that customer should continue to focus on the positive statistics yielded over the last decade.
“Banks have made good progress for well over a decade in raising overall customer satisfaction to record levels, from less than 60 per cent in 2001 to over 80 per cent currently,” he said.
“Advocacy is becoming an increasingly important measure of success for many banks… the challenge now is to improve satisfaction levels, which is the first step.”
