Happy e-Banking Customer Survey

The latest Virtual Online Banking Survey (V-OBS) released this week shows big differences in customer satisfaction between the main UK players. Smile (the online arm of the Co-operative Bank) has emerged top of the league table at present. NatWest and the Alliance & Leicester have been revealed as in joint last position.

This new e-banking study from Virtual Surveys shows a calculated satisfaction score of 4.2 out of a possible 5 for all Smile users. Runner-up banks First Direct (4.0) and Nationwide (3.9) appeared close behind the leader. The research notes that these three players were actually e-banking forerunners, having originally established their operations online during the late 1990s.

The findings indicate that offering an online service alone is no guarantee of happily satisfied clients per se. This can be seen through the mediocre ratings (3.4 out of 5) achieved by the Internet-only banks Cahoot (a subsidiary of Abbey National), IF (a subsidiary of the Halifax) and Egg (spun off from Prudential Insurance). Banking laggards NatWest (2.8 out of 5) and the Alliance & Leicester (2.7 out of 5) were found to be especially poor performers. Respondents claimed that these two were most unsatisfactory, having sluggish websites with many user access problems.

Pete Comley, md of Virtual Surveys, has noted that the speed of response is one of the two factors judged most important by e-banking customers. The other is general ease of use. In response, he has suggested that many e-banks will have to improve their performance or they will put customers off for life.

Logging in and password problems rate as notable user gripes as well. Pete Comley adds that after the factors of speed and usability, customer support has been found to be an important online banking feature. This is an area in which provider First Direct has scored particularly well.

The V-OBS interviewed 4,086 customers of UK online banks between October and December 2001. The fieldwork was conducted online.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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