20 January, 2021, LONDON –

The 27 winners and highly commended companies in the annual Finder Customer Satisfaction Awards have today been announced.

The personal finance comparison site finder.com collected almost 14,000 customer responses across 13 categories within the banking, breakdown cover, credit cards, loans, mortgages, share dealing, TV streaming, and insurance sectors to uncover which companies were excelling in customer service. Consumers were asked how satisfied they were with their provider and if they would recommend it to a friend.

The biggest winner was Aviva, which won both the home and life insurance categories, with a huge percentage of customers recommending the brand – 84% for home insurance, and 79% for life insurance. While, LV= and Royal London were highly commended in these divisions, respectively.

Across the other insurance categories, Admiral was named as the winner for travel insurance. Over 8 in 10 (83%), said they would recommend the brand to a friend. The highly commended company was AXA.

Direct Line was the winner in the car insurance group, with 82% of its customers saying they would speak positively about the brand, while LV= took the highly commended spot.

The best-rated company within pet insurance was Petplan. Around 82% of customers would suggest it to friends. This is closely followed by Animal Friends (79%).

The most recommended brand out of all the categories belonged to Starling Bank. It was named as the business banking provider winner with an impressive 97% of customers saying they would recommend the company to a friend. Highly commended in this category was Barclays.

In the credit card category, American Express won for the second year in a row, with 95% of customers highly recommending their provider. This was followed by Barclaycard, which was highly commended in this group.

In the banking (current accounts) division, Monzo took the crown with 89% of its customers saying they would recommend the digital-only bank to a friend, Nationwide was highly commended. However, Nationwide was named the winner in the mortgages category, with 88% of customers recommending it. Lloyds Bank was highly commended in this section.

Personal loans‘ highest-rated provider was HSBC, and Santander followed. While in the share-dealing category, Freetrade took the winning position and Halifax was highly commended.

9 in 10 (91%) of customers recommended Share Dealing provider Freetrade, putting it top in this category. It was closely followed by Halifax.

In other categories, The AA was named as the winner in the breakdown cover division. Both the RAC and startrescue.co.uk were highly commended. Netflix was named as the winner in the TV streaming section, while Amazon Prime was highly commended.

Commenting on the findings, Jon Ostler, CEO at finder.com said:

“The Finder Customer Satisfaction Awards were created to help customers make the best decisions by understanding which companies are offering the best customer service in their sector. These awards are based upon actual customers’ ratings and recommendations, meaning that winners and highly commended companies are going above and beyond and have really impressed their customers.”

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Methodology
In December 2020 finder.com ran a customer satisfaction survey. A sample of respondents in 13 categories were asked how satisfied they were and ratings were based on a sample of a minimum of 750 responses per sector, excluding Business Banking that had a sample size of 250, totaling 13,928 responses. The 13 categories were banking, business banking, personal loans, credit cards, mortgages, TV streaming, breakdown cover, share dealing, travel insurance, pet insurance, car insurance, life insurance and home insurance. Each brand had a minimum of 30 responses.

The survey asked respondents how satisfied they are with their provider (from one to five) and whether they would recommend the brand to a friend or not. From this, finder.com calculated star ratings and shortlisted the top-performing brands for our awards. When there was a draw on star rating, the recommendation score (that is, the percentage of customers who said they would recommend the brand to a friend) was used to decide the winner.