Valley Residents Unhappy With Quality Of Service From Their Banks

Residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area are highly critical of the level of service they receive from their current banks. This information was drawn from a new, special edition of the O’Neil Associates Valley Monitor Poll, which asked 459 Maricopa County adults the following question:

Over the last few years, how do you feel the personal service you receive from Arizona banks has changed? Has it become more personal, less personal, or stayed about the same?

Given the well-known tendency among members of the general population to feel like the "little guy" being bullied by impersonal financial institutions, we did not expect this question to generate an especially favorable review of Arizona’s banks. But the results were even more negative than we anticipated—worse than what we generally have found in our previous work with clients in the financial sector. Specifically, only eight percent think their banks have become more personal since they first opened their accounts, compared to nearly half (48%) who think that banks instead have become significantly less personal during that time. In other words, six times as many people feel that the personalization of their service has decreased as do those that believe it has increased.

A virtually identical set of figures was returned by a similar, second question posed to the same group of respondents:

How do you feel the service orientation of Arizona banks has changed over the last few years?

Presented with the choices of "less service," "more service," and "about the same," half (49%) of all the respondents said they now are receiving less service from their banks than they used to receive. As was true for the first question, most of the remaining responses (29% overall) to this second question were that banks’ "service orientation" has been essentially unchanged during the last few years. Only about one person in seven (14%) believes his/her bank recently has increased its level of service.

What make these results so disturbing for the financial services industry is the fact that banks’ largest customers are also their least satisfied. That is, the higher-income customers whose business most banks wish to attract are also the most dissatisfied and most demanding of customer groups; compared to their lower-income counterparts, these affluent respondents are more likely to report a downward trend in their banks’ levels of service and personalization. For example, 64 percent of the respondents who enjoy annual incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 said they believe their banks have become less personal during the past few years. In contrast, only 41 percent of respondents making less than $30,000 per year reported a downward trend. Similarly, 56 percent of the respondents with incomes of $75,000 or more said their banks now offer less service than they used to offer a few years ago, compared to only 38% of the under-$30,000 group.

These results are based on 459 interviews conducted with randomly selected heads of household in metropolitan Phoenix. The "sampling error" associated with a survey of this size is approximately ±4.6 percent. This means that the chances are approximately 95 in 100 that we would have obtained the same results, within a margin of ±4.6%, had we interviewed every adult resident of Maricopa County.