NatWest Help versus Santander UK Help. The Battle of Digital Retail Banking Customer Service.
Crisis on the high street, divisions on Brexit and rising competition, Twenty Nineteen has been a challenging year for British banks. With many digital transformations now underway, we decided to take an depth look at how two leading retail banks are competing and winning for digital customer service.
Enter NatWest Help, and Santander UK Help two major retail banks steeped in British banking history.
NatWest Help
With its origins dating back to 1834, Westminster Bank was a British retail bank which operated in England and Wales until its merger into the National Westminster Bank in 1970.
Throughout the eighties, NatWest became symbolic with their collectable family of ceramic piggy banks made in Stoke-on-Trent. Since 2000, NatWest has been part of the wider The Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
Today, NatWest has more than 7.5 million personal customers and 850,000 small business accounts and is considered one of the Big Four clearing banks in the UK.
Santander UK Help
Wholly owned by the Spanish Santander Group. Santander UK is most notable for its entrance into the British banking market with a number of high profile acquisitions. Established on 11 January 2010, with a takeover over of Abbey National, Santander followed with the acquisition of Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester building societies.
Today, Santander UK is one of the leading personal financial services companies and one of the largest providers of mortgages and savings in the UK. The bank has circa 20,000 employees and 14 million active customers.
Continuing our focus on retail this year, we are pleased to bring you this exclusive insight into the performance of two major retail banking brands with very different approaches to digital customer service.
Summary
Armed with new refreshed customer facing websites, and a powerful combination of human public facing help handles and AI powered chat assistants, Santander UK Help and NatWest Help are leading the way for conversational customer service in digital retail banking.
*Accounts are programmatically scored out of 100 on our performance index across four metrics. Inbound mention volumes (25%), Response Rate (25%), Responses under 30 mins (25%) and Sentiment (25%). All metrics are available and updated every hour on HelpHandles.comInbound volume
With ~40k followers, Santander UK Help are on the lower-end of the followers scale, compared to NatWest Help 100k+ followers, but that doesn’t stop them from driving the largest share of conversations with 11,127 mentions received to their help handle over the last 8-weeks.
- Santander UK Help (11,127)
- NatWest Help (9,503)
Response Time
Operating a 24/7 around the clock service, NatWest Help are the fastest retail bank to reply to customers on Twitter, maintaining an average response time of 12 mins. In contrast, Santander UK Help operate during extended business hours only between 8am — 8pm Monday — Friday and 9am — 5pm on Saturday and Sunday, which reflects a more lengthy response time of over 1hr that takes into account out of hours mentions received on Twitter.
- Natest Help (12 mins)
- Santander UK Help (1 hr 12 mins)
Response rate
Responsiveness on public channels like Twitter is important to ensure customers expectations are managed and to keep the conversation flowing.
The Santander UK Help team were the most responsive to customers replying to an impressive 8,456 (76%) of mentions received to the help handle, while the NatWest Help team responded to 5,891 mentions (62%) of mentions received.
- Santander UK Help (76%)
- Natest Help (62%)
Responses under 30mins
The NatWest Help team were the fastest to respond to customers, notching up 97% of responses under 30mins, with Santander UK Help team, also doing well with 80% of responses made in under 30 mins.
- Natest Help (97%)
- Santander UK Help (80%)
Sentiment
Sentiment towards both banks were positive during the last 8 weeks, with both teams working hard to provide fast, efficient and friendly service to customers.
- Santander UK Help (+11)
- Natest Help (+7)
Conversational Service
Conversations are at the heart of meaningful and valuable relationships, and it is the strength of our relationships that determine longevity in life and in business.
Conclusion
While NatWest Help were fastest to respond to customers, the Santander UK Help team were more responsive, receiving and responding to a larger share of mentions to their help handle, and seeing higher sentiment among conversations with customers.
Both NatWest Help and Santander UK Help teams should be commended for their efforts, the results of our analysis clearly show the hard work the teams are committing to servicing customers on social media and the results speak for themselves. Customers love engaging in friendly, open conversations with banks on social media to address questions and issues.
Traditional capitalism as we know it, is dead. We have now entered into a new era of purpose driven business, where organisations have to demonstrate a deeper understanding of their People, their Customers and the legacy they will leave on the Environment.
For years Banks have been plagued with out of date processes, bloated IT infrastructures, and a financial system that has failed its customers.
Since the global financial crisis 10 years ago, the UK’s banks have been under increasing pressure from the Government to reform and diversify. With cash and cheque transactions diminishing in favour of more convenient electronic payment, online and mobile app usage by millions of customers, many of the UK’s major banks have been left to evaluate the viability of their traditional bricks and mortar branch networks.
For banks, it’s now a do or die situation.
With Banco Santander Group announcing EUR20 billion investment on digital technology over the next four years as part of a global wide effort to drive efficiency using robotics, and machine learning to re-engineer processes— traditional banks are now stepping up to the challenge to compete with their younger, more agile counterparts, in an all out battle to become digital leaders over the next decade and beyond.
