GB
NI
You can find more information about this survey, including survey methodology and results from previous years, here: Personal banking service quality | Ipsos
The past two surveys are also discussed in the previous threads below:
Credit: @Lightning720 for previous posts
1% Monzo victory 
Starling fell by double the rate Monzo did.
Where are all the doom & gloom stories for Starling? 
On their forum? 
Then again…
Nice to know I’m banking with the best UK bank for service quality! 
monzo slay
Changes from February:
Monzo -1%
Starling Bank -2%
First Direct No Change
Nationwide -1%
Metro Bank - 2%
Lloyds Bank No Change
Barclays -1%
Halifax No Change
Bank of Scotland -1%
Santander +3%
Natwest +2%
HSBC UK -1%
Co-Op Bank -5%
TSB No Change
Virgin Money -1%
Royal Bank +2%
Hopefully, they are all correct. Do tell me if I’ve made a mistake.
Not many improving, with only Santander, Natwest, and Royal Bank seeing a positive change.
Also, is there any reason why Royal Bank is viewed worse than Natwest? I know it is pointed out each time but did we ever suggest a reason?
Wonder if RBS and NatWest are ran as different entities from a support level? Whereas Lloyds, Halifax etc I believe as of late, are a merged team.
They’re not. And even if they were, it wouldn’t explain the differences in the rest of the polls. The app, the accounts, the overdrafts, the branch network is all identical.
I think a lot of folks chalk it up to 2008, and RBS’s involvement.
We’ll never really know though. It could just be an inherent bias among the population, or even just how they select their sample.
Maybe RBS just has a higher share of customers who aren’t satisfied with the group than NatWest do?
Maybe the fact the NatWest app gets new features first plays into it?
Your guess is as good as anyone’s.
Interesting though I never take much interest in these things as they can be gamed. Much prefer to go off lived experience.
I’m suprised HSBC Is so low. Much better than Natwest and monzo (experience) and as good as FD if not slightly better.
I’m not sure the IPSOS one can be gamed. As I understand it, it’s a randomly selected sample of about 1000 customers from each bank, and I don’t think they choose the same customers over and over again.
The bank awards is probably the only one of note I’d say is gameable. The MSE polls can probably be inflated and influenced, but not necessarily gamed, though they’re the ones that hold the most weight for me.
Trust Pilot is probably a better representative look too. But again, you can influence and inflate the results more favourably just by asking customers to actually review you, especially after a good experience. Unprompted reviews are more likely to be negative.
IPOS will probably one of the best ones as it will be very hard to game with it’s random sampling.
It makes for poor reading for RBS if the sample turned up that result. I don’t have major issues with my RBS but I guess enough do that they wouldn’t recommend them.
ANY that used online surveying will be trivial to game especially when companies target ads and mail shot customers. It’s so trivially easy to use a disposable email address that they are very poor for validity.
As with anything not randomly sampled properly you will get people trying to promote and tarnish who will skew the results just like reviews.
HSBC and FD should be very similar given they’re the same bank… but very different. I’ve seen that before and can’t help thinking they just need the HSBC people to look across the office at what their peers are doing and replicate it…
I think this is where scale comes in. It’s potentially more likely to find customers who like the bank with a sample size of 1m vs 39m that HSBC have.
Also FD customers like them no matter what, they are good but honestly my experience with HSBC for a number of months has been as good if not even slightly better
I don’t think being a HSBC customer and being a First Direct customer is the same experience though, so not so surprising to me that the survey results are different.
But also, First Direct customers are more likely than HSBC customers to have selected First Direct because of a specific feature of the bank (a lot HSBC customers probably just defaulted to HSBC because its their local bank, and don’t really care much about their choice). I think this can lead to First Direct customers being biased toward a positive view of their bank (as a sort of validation of the choice they made). If that sort of thing does happen, Monzo and Starling probably also benefit from a similar effect.
