In financial services, trust is the most important thing to have with your customers, and customer satisfaction is often one of the first signs of whether you’re earning it or the opposite. Whether you’re a traditional bank, credit union, fintech, or insurance provider, understanding how your customers feel about their experience with you isn’t just nice to have, it’s a necessity for long-term brand loyalty and growth.
Customer satisfaction surveys give financial brands the insights they need to uncover friction points, improve service, and stay ahead of expectations. When done right, they’re more than just basic customer service questions and become a powerful tool for customer strategies.
In the financial services industry, you’re not just competing on services or products alone, you’re also competing on customer experience. Customers today expect a certain level of positive experience and communication from their financial institution. Recent research even shows that 91% of customers won’t use a brand after one poor experience with them.
In fact according to a study done, 72% of customers expect a certain speed in relation to customer service assistance and 70% of customers expect full context for their issues from each staff member helping them. That’s not unreasonable, that’s just evolving expectations.
For banks, credit unions, and fintechs alike, customer satisfaction data insights can guide smarter decisions, improve retention, and even inform new product development.
What it means is that surveys take all of the guesswork out of these decisions by providing in-depth feedback tailored to your brands custom problems or questions and giving you answers from your customers.
You’ll also save money on bad decisions that you would have made un-informed. Doing surveys helps your brand not waste any time or money on wondering which strategy is better for you.
Doing surveys for your brand puts you ahead of competition that doesn’t do surveys (since they are in the dark about what their customers really want). However in certain industries it’s known that all major brands do customer surveys so in certain cases, by NOT doing surveys your brand is falling behind.
Surveys can ask questions about your brand’s competitors to compare your brand to theirs and also give you ideas about what you haven’t tried yet for your brand.
You also get to find out about trends in the industry by asking about other brands. By discovering trends you can update your strategy to better go along with your new information.
Download The 2025 State of Banking Report for More Consumer Insights
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) is generally the industry standard for customer satisfaction. Customers are asked to rate their satisfaction with an interaction and given a scale of 1 to 5. It pretty much covers general customer happiness and how your team is able to serve them.
How it can help financial brands specifically is that it can help you catch if there is an issue in your service (especially for certain processes like loan approvals or digital support) and fix it right away to avoid any problems becoming mass spread.
NPS, Net Promoter Score, measures long term loyalty of customers by asking “how likely are you to recommend us?” with a 1 to 10 scale. It’s also another industry standard typically used in customer satisfaction and other related project. Different answers are groups into 3 main categories which tells you who is against your brand, who is for your brand, and who is indifferent (promoters, passives, and detractors).
Why it’s helpful for financial brands specifically is because it gives a good overall snapshot of brand and customer loyalty which is useful for benchmarking over time compared to your previous results or against competitors scores (or other benchmarks).
Watch our video for more on NPS.
Customer Effort Score (CES) typically measures how easy tasks are for customers (like submitting a type of claim or transferring money) and measures the effort that customers put forth. Traditionally lower effort means the customer is more satisfied (and therefore higher retention) and higher effort means less satisfaction.
For an industry like financial services, there are a decent amount of self-serve options for customers. CES scores help you find any friction points for your customers and solve them as soon as possible. Especially since some of these issues cause customers to churn.
Here are some questions that will help you gather valuable feedback from your customers and not just check a box that you did a survey. We created these from the POV of a financial institution asking their customers to be more relatable, but you’ll need to change up these questions a little to fit your brand and audience.
General Satisfaction
Experience and Customer Effort (CES)
Loyalty
Trust
Product & Services
When launching your survey there’s a couple of key things you want to really keep in mind to have a successful launch (and end result). The first one is writing your survey questions. This one is essentially tied to your audience (which is your customers). The other thing to consider is programming, designing, and testing your survey appropriately.
When writing survey questions, you want to primarily consider your audience. Your audience is who will be answering your questions so all of them should be tailored to them. You’ll also need to expertly write your questions by considering things like biases, length of your questions, and leading questions. You’ll want to keep all of those things out of the picture as you’re writing questions, otherwise you’ll risk ruining your data quality.
When we write questions for client projects, we consider both the audience and the question. Then the clients get to pick out what questions they want to have in the survey or which ones they want changed or altered. This helps them get the benefit of an expert writing their questions while still being able to choose what questions they ask their audience. If you’re writing your own though, you’ll want to spend a lot of time on this step.
In this step we’re talking specifically about testing your survey but you’ll want to also consider the design for your survey (and make sure it makes sense for your audience). The design in this case is any type of programming you need for your project (whether it’s complex or simple) and the layout of your questions.
Not something we talked about yet but you’ll also want to consider cleaning your data during the survey which looks like adding specific questions to catch false answers, going though your survey results to find any odd answers that may be false, and adding in possible programming to help catch survey fraud.
Testing your survey before launching is critical because you’ll need to know that your survey works before sending it to your customers (it’s even more important that its your customers and not a random sample or audience). By testing to make sure your survey works on all platforms, you’re setting yourself up for success.
Customer satisfaction isn’t just about knowing how you’re doing — it’s about knowing what to improve, where to innovate, and how to build lasting trust. At Drive Research, we help financial institutions like banks, credit unions, fintechs, and insurance providers design and launch surveys that lead to action.
As a full-service market research firm, we handle everything from survey writing and programming to fieldwork and reporting. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to improve your current approach, we’ll guide you every step of the way.
Want to create surveys that give you real insights, not just check a box? Let’s talk.
