The Daily Mail’s wooden spoon award for worst customer service saw Santander voted second by readers, with 24% of the vote. It was beaten to the top spot by communications company, Talk Talk, which received 28% of all votes.
Meanwhile, Nationwide came fifth in the poll, with 8% of the votes.
Santander admitted that its service had been stretched while trying to integrate three banks (Alliance & Leicester, Abbey and Bradford & Bingley) and said: “We know we have more to do, but we are taking important steps to improve, including creating 1000 new jobs in branches and call centres. Our own satisfaction survey suggests progress is being made.”
The award relates to Santander’s retail bank only. While Abbey for Intermediaries (AFI) has also suffered criticism for its service in the past, the intermediary lender said it has focused heavily on improving service over the past ten months under new managing director, Alan Mathewson.
A spokeswoman for AFI said that the changes it has introduced have enabled it to turn its service around, with its average mortgage offer now nine days, and that it is committed to building upon these improvements in 2011.
Nationwide said that its service issues arose at a specific period of the year when there was high demand for its ISA range: “We know that the service we delivered to some of our customers over the ISA season was below the high standards we set ourselves and we apologise to those who were affected. Going forward, we have been taking steps to ensure that we avoid similar disruption this year.”
The shortlist of ten companies that people voted on was drawn up from the firms that the Daily Mail had received the most complaints about from readers over the year.
The top ten in full were: Talk Talk (28%), Santander (24%), HMRC (12%), Ryanair (9%), Nationwide (8%), Royal Mail (6%), PayPal (5%), npower (4%), Thomas Cook (3%) and europ assistance (1%).
