Transparency Creates Pressure. Action Creates Better Customer Service.

What happens when you make customer feedback public, instead of hiding it in management dashboards?

During a recent visit to the UK, one of our partners noticed something unusual inside a bank branch.
Displayed prominently were the results of an independent customer-service survey. The bank’s performance score was shown alongside competitors across overall, digital and branch service.

This wasn’t advertising. The bank was nowhere near the top!

Since 2018, major UK current-account providers have been required to publish independent customer-feedback scores every six months—in branches and across digital channels.

The logic is compelling.

Banks collect enormous amounts of customer feedback, especially grievances. But much of it remains buried in reports and management dashboards.

Once results become public, the information changes character.

Customers can compare banks. Employees can see how their organisation performs. Management cannot easily explain away a weak score. Customer service becomes a visible area of competition.

Sounds very positive. Bu has transparency actually improved service?

The evidence is mixed.

The UK system has improved comparability and accountability. But there is no clear evidence that publishing scores has transformed customer satisfaction. Customers remain reluctant to switch, while branch satisfaction has actually declined (albeit also due to branch closures, staffing changes and digital migration.)

The lesson?

Transparency creates pressure. But it does not, by itself, create improvement.

This is true for a bank, and for any business, in its dealings with customers.

A company-wide score cannot tell an employee what went wrong yesterday—or what should change tomorrow.

Customer service is created in thousands of everyday moments:
How an employee responds to a worried customer.
Whether a complaint is resolved the first time.
Whether a customer must go from counter to counter to solve a problem.

Public bank-level transparency should therefore be complemented by branch-, journey- and transaction-level feedback shared with employees.

Branch teams should know:
Where are customers waiting too long?
Which problems remain unresolved?
Where did we delight a customer?! (very important!)
What can we improve THIS WEEK?

This must not become a tool for evaluating employees or creating unreliable league tables. Its purpose is to help teams understand the experience they create—and empower them to improve it.

For #CEOs of Banks, and indeed all businesses, focus your customer feedback system to:

Make customer outcomes visible to the market.
Make feedback meaningful to employees.
Make improvement accountable to management and Boards.

At RedVent, we believe customer feedback creates value only when people can hear it, understand it and act on it.

That is when the voice of the customer stops being a score—and starts creating trust, customer value and growth.
#CustomerValueCreation #CustomerExperience #Banking