The banks with great customer service

Current accounts are our financial bedrock, our most used financial products.

So why are we so willing to settle for shoddy service, poorly explained overdraft rates and unfair charges?

Just 6% of us switched current accounts last year, according to the Office of Fair Trading, and, according to Co-op research, we're more likely to change our football team than our primary bank.

What makes it all the more mystifying is that there are some clear winners and losers in this field: accounts with great customer service and those falling way below par.

Current accounts with great customer service

The trouble, of course, is knowing which account really has the best customer service. No bank sticks a 'must try harder' sticker up with their deals, after all.

We've ranked them below based on the latest results from three of the biggest customer service surveys out there, from Moneysavingexpert (MSE), Moneywise and Which? as well as complaints data from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).

Banks ranked

Find more details on these and other accounts in our full, up to date bank account comparison table.

And those worth avoiding...

Santander has managed to gain consistently poor scores for their customer service over the past year.

Santander customers took the most complaints to the FOS last year and scored the lowest in both the MSE and Which? surveys.

Lloyds TSB, HBOS (Halifax and Bank of Scotland) and Barclays also received scores around the bottom of the tables.

However, it should be noted that this is, to some extent, a numbers game: bigger banks get more complaints and it's difficult to quantify, with the data we have available, just how many customers are satisfied, just not bouncing-off-the-walls happy.

Surveying the surveys

No survey of customer satisfaction can hope to be completely unbiased and comprehensive which is why we've taken so many different sources into account.

The three surveys come from a broad sample of current account customers as follows:

• Moneysavingexpert: 6,500 site users
• Which?: 10,600 subscribers
• Moneywise: 12,000 magazine readers

They also quantify satisfaction in different ways: Moneywise just asks for the top providers; Which? uses an overall satisfaction scale and asks how likely members are to recommend their bank to a friend while Moneysavingexpert just asks for a 'great', 'ok' or 'poor' rating.

The FOS only gets involved when consumers are dissatisfied with the way their bank has tried to resolve their issue.

Not only do the biggest banks necessarily get the most complaints - pushing smaller operators including First Direct and Co-operative to the top - the data doesn't show that customers make less complaints, other bank customers could make more but their bank could be better at placating them.