Small banks are better at customer service: survey

Commonwealth Bank is delivering the highest customer satisfaction of the big four banks – but smaller lenders are doing even better.

The average customer satisfaction rating for the big four banks was 78.7 per cent in the six months to November, according to a Roy Morgan Research survey of 50,000 Australians.

The breakdown for the big four was:

• Commonwealth Bank 79.6 per cent
• NAB 78.3 per cent
• Westpac 78.1 per cent
• ANZ 77.5 per cent

The average customer satisfaction for all banks, large and small, was 80.6 per cent, which means each of the big four banks was below average.

Not-for-profit mutual banks, which tend to be relatively small institutions, scored even higher, at 90.0 per cent.

Although the big four banks have below-average customer satisfaction ratings, they are doing much better than their low point in 2001, when they scored just 55.3 per cent.

The Roy Morgan survey also found that the big four’s mortgage customers are less satisfied than non-mortgage customers – 75.7 per cent v 79.4 per cent.

However, that gap (3.7 percentage points) has closed from the year before (5.1 percentage points), when the satisfaction scores were 75.4 per cent v 80.5 per cent.

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