Canadians are entering the 3rd decade of the 2000’s with the worst financial services’ customer service levels seen in the past two decades. It has been long thought that the Financial Services’ industry was one of the key benchmarks of customer service excellence and innovation. This report looks at the past 10 years of financial services’ service levels in Canada focusing on the digital banking and self-directed brokerage industries and highlights the new landscape of customer service in Canada while demonstrating the harsh reality that retail consumers are clearly receiving inferior service while being pushed back to traditional face-to-face cross-selling.
Surviscor Group’s flagship brand, Surviscor, evaluated over 45 financial services firms represented by the big banks, credit unions and independent firms between 2009-2019.
Surviscor Group’s flagship brand, Surviscor, accumulated over 70,000 INDIVIDUAL service records between 2009-2019, representing over 1,700 service requests per firm over the period.
Surviscor accumulated over 1,700 service interactions PER FIRM which included 30+ Canadian Banking firms and 15+ Canadian Self-Directed Discount Brokerage firms.
The data indicates that, on average, service requests are answered in 55-62 hours across the industries. Moving into the next decade, are consumers going to accept the current levels and downward trends or are they going to seek out firms who differentiate with responsive quality service? Are the much-touted Millennials and Generation Z’s going to seek out incremental rate and cost savings at the expense of poor service? In general, the trends indicate less hours of service availability, both in hours per day and days of the week, and unprecedented cross-selling pressure by firms.
The saying goes "You can Run ... BUT You can't Hide". The amount of excuses to hide service truths, or poor vendor partnerships, is without explanantion. Senior executives must be in the know and accept noting less than being the best when it comes to customer service.
What do these findings mean to individual firms? Surviscor Group can help banking and brokerage firms monitor, benchmark and evaluate their current customer service results and recommend ways to improve and differentiate themselves versus industry peers.
Surviscor has been analyzing customer service experience since 2006, compiling in excess of 100,000 service interactions across 45-plus firms. The Service Monitoring and Benchmarking program analyzes service interactions initiated through Canadian banking and self-directed brokerage firm’s chosen public-facing interaction facility. The program has amassed approximately 2,000 experiences per firm which have been individually compiled and benchmarked versus individual industry firms to determine the best, and the worst, Canadian banking and self-directed brokerage firms.