J.D. Power Banking Survey Shows Drop in Customer Satisfaction

Although American Airlines has been aptly criticized for introducing a ludicrous baggage-check fee, at least the company was upfront about it. Banks have been levying dubiously disclosed “stealth fees” against customers for years for unintentional overdrafts and cash advances, and the latest survey of customer banking satisfaction from J.D. Power shows people are fed up.

The overall customer satisfaction index dropped 26 points on a 1000-point scale to 737 this year, and dissatisfaction with fees turned out to be the most common problem. It’s not really a surprise, considering a Government Accountability Office report released in January found bank fees overall had increased by about 10 percent since 2000, with $36 billion spent by consumers on banking fees in 2006.

About half of the GAO surveyors couldn’t find comprehensive fee information online, and roughly 20 percent couldn’t get fee details when actually visiting the banks. (I recently closed a Wells Fargo savings account and transferred all my cash to checking, mostly because occasional automatic transfers from savings to checking were costing me $20 a pop, far more than I was earning in savings interest.)

As retail-banking analyst Ron Shevlin points out on his blog, the downturn contradicts the February results of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which actually found customer satisfaction with banks was on the up. But both surveys named Wachovia Bank as the overall winner in customer satisfaction.

Can any Wachovia customers out there attest to the bank’s reasonable fees or lack thereof? I’m still getting double-charged on a regular basis for using non-member ATMs.