A Facebook poll conducted by Commonwealth Bank of Australia has provided fresh insights into customer perspectives of its online banking service, NetBank.
The bank used its Facebook page to ask customers which services they found the most useful when banking online with NetBank, such as as updating Tax File Numbers (TFN), changing card PINs, ordering statements, and other personalisation features.
By an overwhelming majority and taking out more than half the votes, the winner was 'Choosing and changing card PINs'.
Drew Unsworth, general manager for online banking at CommBank, says this result came as no surprise, with the bank recording over 140,000 PIN changes in April alone.
The bank has responded to the popularity of this feature by exporting it to its mobile banking app.
The runner-up in the poll was 'Nicknaming and grouping accounts'. Unsworth relates an anecdote about a friend who often pilfered her savings account to splurge on new shoes, but curbed the habit by re-naming the account as 'DO NOT SPEND!'.
"And if you wanted to take it further you can even hide your accounts so they're out of sight and out of mind," he says.
Aside from the rough and ready Facebook polling, the bank has a more formal destination for curating user feedback with IdeaBank, a crowd-sourced portal for customers to post ideas for new products and features.
Unsworth says the bank uses the feedback to not only create new features and functions, but also to improve existing ones. For example, the bank will soon re-introduce debit and credit columns to online transaction views following a recent revolt over an earlier decision to drop the feature.
"This is a feature that customers feel passionately about so from mid-June everyone will be able to switch between a single and double column view with a toggle on the top right of the page to give you control," says Unsworth.
Similar customer feedback loops have popped up in the UK, with Royal Bank of Scotland's Ideas Bank portal, and first direct's online Lab for testing customer responses to new products.