Large banks scoring better on customer satisfaction.

• Author: Motley, L. Biff
• Position: Customer Satisfaction

The banking industry's customer satisfaction scores are on an upswing, according to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The reason is that the CEOs of the nation's largest banks, which this survey covers, are focused these days more on their retail clients and less on mergers and integration issues.

The ACSI is a broad-based satisfaction study conducted under the aegis of the University of Michigan. This study looks at satisfaction levels across virtually all consumer retail categories and expresses comparative results on a percentile basis, where 100 is perfect. The survey includes only the very largest banks, such as Bank of America, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, Bank One and a few others. Smaller bank's clients are not surveyed, but comparisons can be made with the FCSI (Financial Client Satisfaction Index) surveys done by community banks. The FCSI is a service provided by the ABA. (See www.clientsatisfaction.com).

Small banks generally score higher

Interestingly, the comparisons highlight some key strategic issues for community banks. Overall, the average score among large banks in the ACSI study is 76 (base = 100). The overall average among smaller banks in the ABA FCSI study is 87 (5.2 on a 6 point scale for "overall satisfaction"). Although the methodologies differ, it remains clear that smaller banks achieve higher satisfaction scores. This has largely to do with the fact that the key factors driving satisfaction are the day-to-day, people-to-people service protocols, which have always remained the focus of smaller banks.

The larger banks' scores are returning to the levels they achieved prior to the merger "boom" of the late 1990s. During this period, large bank managers were distracted by both the merger integration challenges and a misguided notion that Internet banking would somehow...