Have the banks ever heard of NPS?

Whilst I don't believe Net Promter Score is by any means the only metric a brand should use, it does show what we all think ... that just about all the banks are much of a muchness.

When I carried out a bit of quant' research on the relative NPS of leading consumer banks... sure enough First Direct were way out ahead with Nationwide and Co-operative also scoring well - the other were nowhere to be seen, all logging minus figures.

Now when they're rebuilding, let's hope they do better with differentiating themselves and paying a bit more attention to individual customer preferences.

A start for them (and some other sectors) is to segue from these vanilla 'extras package' like the one offered on NatWest Gold to building personalised packages. They try to offer all things to all men and succeed in just giving a series of discounts on a) things you can easily get elsewhere, b) stuff that you're just not interested in.

Try taking a leaf out of O2's book = simple bolt-on options (like mobile banking or 1 month payment holiday when overdrawn ... put your mind to it and you can easily add to the list).

More to the point ... a little data capture to uncover the passions of their customers in order to serve a deeper set of benefits (rather than just a broad scatter-gun style of benefits). And above all engage with customers ... let them help build the benefits.

But I suspect that this represents just a little bit too much work ... too many times you see things which can be classified as 'it's easy, so let's do it'. It's not going to work anymore with the emerging power of peer-to-peer.

Give customers what they truly want and just watch those fingers type, mouths move and the herd starts moving ... the payback is free and 'trusted' advertising by an emerging band of advocates.