Customer satisfaction in the banking and building societies sector rose this year to become the third highest-scoring group on the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI).
The Institute of Customer Service's latest figures for July show customer satisfaction in the sector jumped to a UKCSI score of 80.4 (out of 100), an increase of 0.7 points from July 2017 and the highest since the UKCSI began in 2008.
Yorkshire Bank, First Direct, Nationwide and M&S topped the satisfaction charts, with the sector as a whole ranking 1.1 percentage points above the insurance industry.
Despite a slight drop on the year before, mortgage customer satisfaction still sat at a score of 75.2, up from January's score of 74.4 - a sustained high figure that Nick Morrey, product technical manager at John Charcol, partially attributed to the cost of mortgages over the past year being the lowest for decades.
He said: "If borrowing a large sum of money results in affordable payments that are agreed quickly and do not suffer ongoing administration issues, then you are likely to be satisfied."
Mr Morrey said lenders have also been internally targeting their underwriting process, recognising it to be a labour-intensive stage in the mortgage application process, in which borrowers frequently interact with lenders and could therefore result in an increased risk of frustration.
He added: "Targeting the underwriting process works really well with ‘clean’ or ‘vanilla’ cases that are well packaged and have all the supporting documentation present from the outset and many lenders can then get a mortgage offer released within 10 working days.
"If people are indeed getting their offers so quickly, then I would say the increase in mortgage satisfaction is in part due to this effort lenders have put in to their processes."
The satisfaction index also showed that in person interaction remained the most frequently used channel in the banking and building society sector, accounting for 43.3 per cent of customer experiences and staff attitude in the complaints handling process ranking in some of the highest scores above the UK average.
Customer experience through the use of apps was higher than any other sector, increasing to 5.7 per cent and attracting the highest satisfaction of any channel at a score of 83.4.
rachel.addison@ft.com
