Credit Unions vs. Banks: Dueling Headlines Part II
“Study: In Customer Service Battle, Big Banks Win”
MainStreet.com posted in February the results of a study by RateWatch and IntelliShop which purports to show that credit unions, “for all their benefits, just aren’t as good as big banks at closing the deal with prospective customers.”
The study used mystery shoppers to visit 120 financial institutions across the U.S. and to gauge how big banks (<$10B in total assets), small banks and credit unions perform “when it comes to wooing customers who express interest in opening an account.” The shoppers reported back on everything from parking availability to the dress and demeanor of each bank’s or credit union’s representative. According to MainStreet, “What they found revealed a lot about the challenges that smaller institutions face in keeping up with the giants of the banking world.”
What they found, according to the report, was that the large banks not only did a better job of assessing customer needs, they were much more proactive about selling the benefits of the bank and its services. For example, shoppers, upon entering a credit union, were immediately greeted by a customer service representative 53% of the time, vs. 63% of the time at small banks and 76% of the time at large banks.
Twenty percent of the credit union representatives thought to ask shoppers whether they wanted a business or personal account, compared to 50% of the big bank representatives. Similarly, only 20% of credit union representatives asked about shopper interest in online banking services, compared with 64% of representatives “at online banks.”
Based on these and other indicators, the prospective customers claimed to be more likely to lean toward joining the big bank: 42% of shoppers in the survey left the banks feeling “confident that this bank would be the right choice,” compared to 30% for credit unions and 22% for small banks.
So, which institution is better at customer service, banks or credit unions? In this case, it seems to be a matter of how you define “service”. The battle continues in our next posts as we examine conflicting headlines on bank switching.
