The report also revealed that mobile banking and internet banking as the service channels with highest customer satisfaction.

As of December 2021, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) recorded the highest customer satisfaction across three of the service channels including mobile banking (90.8%), internet banking (87.8%) and branch banking (83.5%). The CBA had customer satisfaction of 76.3% for phone banking.

There was little to split with their three competitors: Australia and New Zealand Bank came in second overall with 89.2% (mobile), 86.6% (internet), 83.2% (branch) and 76.6% (phone).

Westpac followed with 87.9% (mobile), 86.1% (internet), 82.1% (branch) and the highest of the big four for phone banking (79.4%).

NAB rounded out the big four with 89.8% (mobile), 86.5% (internet), 81.5% (branch) and 77.3% (phone).

Mobile banking (via a mobile or tablet app) proved to be the banking channel with the highest customer satisfaction, with an average rating among the big four banks of 89.4%.

Internet banking, which is visiting a bank’s website, received the second highest average satisfaction rating with 86.8%. Branch banking followed with 82.6%, and phone banking, which involves calling the bank directly, came in fourth with 77.4%.

Mobile banking has now overtaken internet banking as the most used banking service channel.

The high customer satisfaction for mobile banking is good news as it is the preferred method for customers to access their banking accounts – overtaking usage of internet banking for the first time during 2021.

Nearly two-thirds of Australians, 63.6%, now use mobile banking apps on a mobile phone or tablet to access their bank accounts, up seven percentage points on a year ago.

Internet banking, which is conducting banking through an institution’s website, remains as the second most used channel with a bare majority of 50.3% using this service, but down 9.1% points on a year ago.

Visiting a branch is clearly the third preferred service channel used by 47.4% of people, down 6.2 percentage points on a year ago while phone banking is used by only 22.8% of people, virtually unchanged on a year ago.

Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine says mobile banking apps continue to grow in popularity. Customer satisfaction is over 2.5 percentage points higher for mobile banking apps than any other service channel.

“For the first time in 2021 more Australians used a mobile banking app: 63.6% (up seven percentage points on 2020) than internet banking: 50.3% (down 9.1 percentage points), to conduct their banking – a swing of 16.1 percentage points on a year earlier. The rise of mobile banking apps is also coming at the expense of visiting a branch – which fell 6.2 percentage points to 47.4%,” Levine says.

“The good news for the big four banks is that customer satisfaction with mobile banking apps is higher for customers of the big four banks (89.4%) than the industry average for all banks (89%) – the only banking service channel the big four banks have an advantage.”

“The higher customer satisfaction ratings of the automated banking channels give an extra incentive to banks and other financial services firms to increasingly move as many of their services online as possible,” Levine adds.

“An added benefit for the banks of moving customers online is the reduced labour costs associated with these frictionless banking channels and it’s easy to see why the trends of recent years are set to continue with even greater technological integration and less face-to-face interaction with staff in an increasingly connected world,” Levine concludes.