LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Retail banks improved customer satisfaction in 2012, according the National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI-UK) and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Customer satisfaction with banks increased to an industry average of 77 in the US, and 74 in the UK.
In both countries, smaller banks and building societies are the driving force behind rising customer satisfaction. Personalised service and highly satisfied customers make smaller banks an attractive alternative for customers, and the US has recently seen a large migration of customers from large banks to smaller institutions and credit unions. In the UK, smaller banks and building societies are gaining customer satisfaction at twice the rate of the industry, leaving big banks trailing behind.
“Big banks must change the way they do business,” says Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and author of The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference. “If they don’t, they will continue to lose customers. To compete with smaller financial institutions, they need to decentralize their services. Local branches know their customers best.”
Big banks may be forced to improve customer satisfaction in order to maintain market share, but a large increase of customers to smaller institutions poses challenges to small banks and building societies as well. With an influx of new customers, smaller institutions – whose size has allowed their service advantage – may struggle to maintain service levels.
The challenge now for big banks is how to improve customer service; otherwise they will continue to lose customers – for smaller players, the challenge is to maintain the high level of customer service so that they may keep the newly gained customers.
About NCSI-UK
The National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI) is an economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United Kingdom. NCSI applies the technology and methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which is the standard measure of citizen satisfaction used by the US Federal Government.
This methodology was developed at the University of Michigan and has been adopted worldwide as a leading macro- and micro-level indicator by universities, governments and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Singapore, Korea, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Indonesia and Barbados. All indices are reported on a 0-100 scale.