What makes a bank attractive?

Question

I am currently researching the impact of blogs, social network sites, pod casts and virtual communities on banking customer satisfaction.

Would you want your bank to offer virtual communities where you can meet fellow customers and discuss issues around finance? Would you use these kind of services?

A couple of banks are present in second life. Would you want to be a customer of an "innovative" bank, that talks to you through blogs, that has interactive websites and offers many ways of communicating?

Yahoo Answers, just for banks. Is this for you?

Answer 1

The banks that excel in the following services will be more attractive and prferred by majority of customers.

1 Security of money in all sorts of accounts like Savings bank, Recurring Deposit, fixed deposits, ATMs etc.
2 Custemer satisfaction with very courteous and prompt services.
3 Timely statements.
4 Banks with advanced technology to speed up all activities.
5 Comparitively more interest paying banks.

Answer 2

I would like banks to communicate over the internet, but frankly until they come up with better controls for phishing and other spam, I am skeptical of much that comes to me over the web. You can't imagine how many bogus emails I get every day, and some of them say that they are from my bank and that I need to take immediate action.

Here's another example. When I pay my credit card online, I get an email confirmation. The other day I got an email from the same company, it looked very legit, and it said that I would no longer get paper statements and that I had to go to this website to make sure the new electronic statements were set up properly. It looked very real, but I assume it wasn't. Now this company, we'll call it Citibank, has done very well for me over the years. But now I'm not sure I can trust anything they email to me.

I guess my point is that the web is nice, but its hard to trust all you see there.

Answer 3

Well 'forward looking' is OK, but Banks REALLY should spend MORE time on Security and LESS time on' blowing their own trumpets'....

I still get (genuine) emails from my Bank containing embedded 'links' ... yes, they are OK, BUT it 'teaches' their Customers to 'click' on links in emails and sooner or later that Customer is going to get caught by the Phishing scam merchants ..

Some Banks think that having multiple 'layers' of passwords is more secure .. however in order to cope with their 'multiple layers' we ALL have to write down the passwords ..