TD Waterhouse and Bank of Montreal have been awarded top honours by Toronto-based Surviscor in the research firm’s 2012 Customer Email Responsiveness (CER) review.
TD Waterhouse won for the third straight year in the competitive online brokerage industry segment with a CER score of 85% and an average response time slightly above two hours.
BMO is the new online banking industry winner, which includes both Canadian banks and credit unions, with a CER score of 96% and an average response time below 4 hours.
The review analyzes over 180 ‘mystery shopper’ emails sent between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2012 to 45 Canadian financial services firms.
Surviscor tracks all correspondence with the firms, including the time to respond, the availability of auto-responses and performance of the stated response guidelines, the details of the email dialogue and the validity of the answer provided.
“The top firms in the brokerage industry are providing near immediate responses during business hours” says Glenn LaCoste, president of Surviscor.
“The same cannot be said in the banking industry where few firms are managing to respond in less than four hours” adds LaCoste.
The brokerage industry’s top five firms respond on average in three and a half hours while banking’s top five is slightly below seven hours.
Surviscor is currently piloting a social media campaign that will be introduced into the CER Program in 2013, recognizing the need to review the customer service levels in the growing social media industry.