BMO Bank of Montreal provides the best customer service amongst Canadian banking firms while Meridian Credit Union provides the best service amongst Canadian credit unions, according to a yearlong mystery shopping program conducted by Toronto-based research and business analysis firm Surviscor.
Qtrade Investor provides the best service in the Canadian discount brokerage industry.
The Customer Email Responsiveness (CER) program, now in its eighth year, analyzed over 175 ‘mystery shopper’ emails, per firm, sent between Jan. 1, 2013 and Dec. 31, 2013 to over 40 leading Canadian financial services firms.
Surviscor establishes a CER Rating for each firm as well as tracks every detail of correspondence with the firms. Details include the time to respond, the performance of the stated response guidelines through auto-responses, the full email dialogue and the validity of the answer provided.
The CER results indicate that the brokerage industry responds, on average, in half the time of a banking firm; however, the brokerage industry’s top five firms respond on average in less than three regular hours while banking’s top five respond in four hours. The key result is that the best brokerage firms typically respond in less than one hour during business hours.
“The industry results both indicate and validate that email responsiveness is not a lost method of communication,” says Glenn LaCoste, president of Surviscor.
“Firms are trying to push both current and potential customers to social media channels to supposedly provide better service; however, the best firms are servicing customers where the customer wants to be serviced and should be praised for their efforts” adds LaCoste.
Complete rankings can be found at www.surviscor.com.