Posted by Christopher Stevenson
Forrester Research recently published its Customer Experience Index, which reports the results of a survey in which over 4,700 consumers were asked about their interactions with a variety of companies, including banks and CUs.
The results? Credit unions, as a collective, led banks in overall consumer satisfaction. CUs received excellent ratings in usefulness (tying with BB&T and inching past Citizens Bank) and are the only institutions in the bank category that received excellent ratings in ease of use. For enjoyability, credit unions received only a 69 percent, which is at the high end of an "okay" rating. That seems low, but it blows nearly all the banks out of the water. For comparison, consider that on the retail side, Macy's earned only a 67 percent and Amazon.com earned 70 percent on enjoyability.
My take? Credit unions are doing a tremendous job. They rank fifth overall in customer experience across all industries and are the only non-retailer in the top 10. Think of this; the only companies that topped CUs for customer experience are Costco, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Target. Woohoo!
But there's a challenge. Non-CU members don't see a difference between banks and CUs. They think they'll have the same cruddy customer experience they have when they work with Citibank, Wachovia or BofA. Why is that? According to Forrester's survey, credit unions are different. They are the Barnes and Noble of financial service customer experience. But as Jeffry commented on an earlier post, "It's very hard to differentiate based on just service alone, especially if you haven't taken that next step to define precisely HOW your service experience differs from others." (In that same post, I challenged whether CUs really had the gumption to publish unfiltered member survey results to their Web sites. From the results of the Forrester survey, I'm beginning to think that many CUs could actually do it.)
Is it possible to communicate credit unions' level of customer experience to non-members? It's a challenge and I'm not sure how to resolve it. What do you think?
BONUS: If you are employed by a credit union and would like to access the entire Customer Experience Index report (or any other Forrester reports), you can sign up for a free trial of Forrester Research. Just email Rhonda Armstrong at Rhonda@cues.org with your contact information and she'll set you up.
