New Survey Confirms Poor Customer Service Attitude In Ghanaian Banks

It’s been a little pet peeve of mine for a while, complaining about the attitudes those supposed to be ‘customer care’ in Ghana show towards the customers. If you didn’t know, it’s terrible, and attitudes like that in do not belong in any professional environment.

A recent survey by an association known as the Customer Service Academy, sampling banks in and around Osu, has found that customer care is far from the ideal institutions of such stature should be portraying.

The Osu area serves as a sort of annex to the Central Business District, so the survey was wide enough to cover variety of banks despite the limitations of geography.

The survey focused on a few areas, such as the availability of avenues for customers to air their views and suggestions, availability of restroom facilities, and crucially customer service relations.

Not surprisingly, no bank was able to score A, or 90% and above representing outstanding, four banks got ‘F’, with majority falling within average categories.

The survey also noted the absence of ‘name tags’ from tellers, whilst pointing out several negative attitudes exhibited by employees in their relationship to the public.

It also noted appearances sometimes played a role in the kind of service a customer received, hence someone all dressed up looking like a big man or woman might receive preferential treatment.

Pity they didn’t notice the super preferential treatments foreigners also get, that attitude always bugged me.

The rankings of the banks, graded by performance are as follows: A-, for excellent service had Cal Bank, GT Bank, United Merchant Bank, and UT Bank.

Access Bank, GCB, and First Capital Plus graded B, for very good service. Ecobank and Barclays Bank had C, representing Good service.

Fidelity Bank, Bank of Africa, Zenith, and Standard Chartered Bank got grade D, for above average service. ADB was ranked average, or grade E.

For the least grade, F, Royal Bank, UniBank, NIB, and Societe Generale all scored to represent the banks tagged with providing below average service.

Some of these are some of the biggest companies in the country, and they really shouldn’t be falling short at a concept as basic as good customer relations.

So there is the grading and if you bank with any of them do you agree with the assessment of the Customer Service Academy? Or your bank performs better or worse than were they were placed?

Personally, I say move GCB a couple rungs down.