First Direct top in our banking service poll.
Last week, we asked you to vote in our twice-annual banking customer service poll, and more than 3,400 people responded. Of the banks that received 100+ votes, First Direct came top with 90% of its customers rating it ‘great’ and just 4% ‘poor’. Surprisingly, Monzo - which won the last poll - took the wooden spoon with 43% rating it ‘poor’. Next worst was Santander with a 21% ‘poor’ rating.
A few things to note:
-The sample size is small per bank (so Monzo was rated by 152 people)
-There’s a high poor and great rating, and low ok rating. Marmite effect? Monzo is doing some things very well, but annoying enough people with the things it’s getting wrong
-The x axis varies per bank, so it makes the bar charts hard to compare visually, which is annoying
-Starling got around 90% great
It’s interesting that it’s dropped from top performer to lowest performer in six months. Which either suggests: fluctuation due to small sample size, or Monzo has done something wrong in the past six months. Or a combination of both.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back to top/near top in the next survey.
However, there has been remarkable consistency for First Direct. It won every survey they ever did, until Monzo pushed them into second place.
FD is closed to new accounts right now. So existing customers are happy and stay I guess. Hard to screw that up. And they removed minimum requirements for keeping the account too.
As much as you can blame this and that, Monzo’s customer service has gone down the toilet over the last 6 months (personally I believe longer) and doing the absolutely bare minimum with regards to helping customers during COVID-19 has contributed to it.
As much as we like to sugarcoat it here, it’s clear that people aren’t happy.
Unless you’re asking them 152 people to elaborate on why they answered that way then it’s all speculation, I’ve not looked at the results but I’m assuming there’s no breakdown like that about why that answer was scored
It’s more that I wouldn’t expect a distribution of (representative) data to be shaped in the way this graph is.
Regardless of how I perceive the service to be, and my opinions on that, I’d expect a greater proportion of consumer would be in the OK box than are in this chart.
It’s not “jumping to conspiracy theories”, it’s more “would a ‘normal distribution’ result in a chart that looks like this”
Just off the top of my head wasnt there a few poor decisions around service recently that could have caused monzo to slip without the conspiracy theorys?
Chat being harder to find
Chat now having contact hours
Being one of the slower banks to react to covid - overdraft/loan charges/holidays
Overdraft charge changes from flat fee to %?
All valid reasons you could argue that the service offered by monzo has got worse over last few months as opposed to improving
I think it’s representative of the respondents being made up mostly of those very supportive of Monzo and those either upset by or unsupportive of Monzo. In that way, I’d say average users probably haven’t seen or responded to the poll in a significant number.
Edit: which I’d note can be fairly typical. People only leave reviews (or seek out banking polls) when they’re very happy or unhappy.
Every time I see any mention of Monzo on that site or in the newsletters it tends to be negative. They seem to love Starling and not have much good to say about Monzo.
Also, how do they verify that the people who love/hate Monzo’s customer service are even customers/have experienced it?
I’ve been helping my family out with Monzo recently and had a few CS interations. They take a very long time to reply and calling them is pointless as the call just disconnects when they don’t answer the phone. Such a low score doesn’t surprise me at all.
You really can’t just decide it’s crap and assume those 152 people were all lying. It’s done on percentage. Those 152 people could have had a very bad experience. Do you not even consider it might be Monzo CS that caused this instead of Martin?
