KEY POINTS:
Smaller banks continue to outperform their larger counterparts in the latest survey on banks' customer service.
According to the Nielsen Consumer Finance Monitor, released yesterday, Kiwibank and ASB provide the best customer service among this country's main banks.
Seventy-four per cent of their customers rated Kiwibank and ASB as very good or excellent in terms of overall service, higher than the 72 per cent of National Bank customers.
But the major players continue to lag behind the standards set by smaller banks, said Nielsen's director of financial services research, Lindy Osborne.
"It's worth noting that although they have smaller customer bases, TSB Bank, BankDirect and PSIS experience very high service ratings - in fact higher than the major banks."
The latest results show that 95 per cent of TSB customers rate their bank as excellent or very good, with PSIS and BankDirect rating at 88 per cent and 86 per cent respectively.
"It is clearly more difficult to increase ratings if they are already at this level, so these have remained stable over the last 12 months, rather than increased," Ms Osborne said.
Most banks made slight improvements on results from a year ago, based on rolling annual data.
The biggest improvement among the main banks came from ANZ (64 per cent) and the Bank of New Zealand (69 per cent).
Westpac had the lowest score among the major banks with 59 per cent.
The greatest improvement was in the performance of bank branches.
BNZ continued to come out on top of the major banks in terms of branch service, with 83 per cent of branch customers rating the service as excellent or very good.
ANZ and Kiwibank had shown the largest improvements in branch performance during the past 12 months, and now 80 per cent of ANZ customers rated the branch service as very good or excellent. Westpac took the wooden spoon for branch customer service with 73 per cent.
The monitor surveys 2500 people aged over 15 four times every year.
* BIG BANK RANKINGS
First equal Kiwibank, ASB
3rd National Bank
4th BNZ
5th ANZ
