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Customer professionals generally agree that complaint or problem resolution is a key to maintaining client loyalty. Unresolved problems have a particularly negative impact on both continued product use and word-of-mouth recommendations to others. Dissatisfied customers tell far more people about their experience than do routinely satisfied customers. The bank's response to customer problems can be critical importance. Data from Technical Assistance Research Programs (TARP) finds that the majority (63%) customers who do take the time to complain are not completely satisfied with the bank's response to their problem. Various studies indicate that adequate problem/complaint resolution -- or service recovery -- leads to increased (not merely retained) customer loyalty. Newly satisfied customers are turned into active advocates for the business. The importance problem resolution to customer satisfaction was confirmed in a recent study one bank's retail banking clients. As part an ongoing improvement program, a $2 billion-assets locally owned Midwest bank joined with our firm to develop and test satisfaction surveys for both retail and commercial customers. Surveys were mailed to a randomly selected sample 1,620 customers who used the bank for at least three services (checking, savings, ATM). Many these customers also had loans from the bank. A three-wave mailing resulted in 973 usable responses. For the purposes this report, we are focusing on correlations between the questionnaire items and overall score, rather than on satisfaction scores themselves. Banks differ from one another in performance quality and scores will thus vary considerably from bank to bank. On the other hand, issues most to customers should be fairly consistent across institutions. Issues of most concern can be defined as those questionnaire items most highly correlated with overall satisfaction. In our work in the health-care field, we find that correlations between survey items and overall satisfaction score are remarkably similar across institutions. In other words, although hospital quality and individual patient experiences may vary significantly, what's important to patients does not vary much from provider to provider. Pending additional research, we assume the same holds for bank customers. We feel confident that results from this study a single bank can be generalized to other financial institutions. The accompanying table shows the correlations we found at the bank. The ordering items yields several surprises. Accuracy -- a characteristic stressed frequently in our bank customer focus groups -- is fairly high on the list, yet falls well below other elements in its relation to overall satisfaction with the bank. Customer experiences that typically yield the most vocal complaints -- waiting time, convenience banking hours, and even teller courtesy -- are least correlated with overall satisfaction. …
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