I read somewhere that a bank’s customer taped 297 minutes of being put on hold by their call centre!

While this may be an extreme example, there’s no doubt that poor customer service is standard fare at many banks around the world. In the 2011 edition of their annual survey of banking customers, a global consulting firm reports that in every region of the world, barring a few countries in Southern Europe, poor service was the primary reason behind customers changing their main bank. With there being little to choose between the products offered by different banks, customers are deciding whom to bank with based on the quality of service.   But banks continue to be concerned and with good reason.

•        In the banking customer survey mentioned earlier, nearly half the respondents said that their confidence in banks had dipped further over the past year.

•        In the years since the downturn, there has been a more than four-fold increase in customer complaints at call centres in the U.K.

•        Gen Y, which will account for nearly a quarter of the world’s population by 2015, is ‘extremely willing to switch banks.’ No prizes for guessing why.

If this isn’t reason enough for banks to improve customer service, here’s one more: some regulators are planning to introduce customer service guidelines and penalties for defaulting banks.

Since banks can’t obviously go back to the old days when branch staffers knew each customer by name, what can they do instead to raise their service levels? For starters, allow customers the option of tailoring products and services to their liking, use technology to make banking more convenient – for instance, enable customers to deposit cheques by scanning and e-mailing cheque images via mobile and perhaps humanise the banking relationship once more…Will appending the branch manager’s cubicle with a social media jam-room be a good move forward in this direction?