Your marketing managers are no doubt aware of the American Customer Satisfaction index, which has become an important benchmark for a lot of companies.

When it comes to satisfaction with financial services companies, the most recent index has confirmed that credit unions have gained credibility in the consumer market. In fact, customer satisfaction with credit unions has hit an all-time high, soaring to a score of 87 on a 100 point index. That's the highest score ever attained by one of the 47 industries monitored by the index. At the same time, customer satisfaction with banks fell a bit to 75.

So the gulf has widened, perhaps due to all the generally negative press about banks vis a vis thrifts. At the big bank level, we've seen some interesting moves. JPMorgan and Citigroup managed to increase their scores, to 73 (a 6 percent gain) and to 70 (a 4 percent gain) respectively.

The laggard is Bank of America, which posted a score of 68, in line with the previous year. Obviously, the bitterly negative press, the public outcry over its disastrous attempts to impose a debit card fee and lingering bad media over its mortgage policies have taken a toll. As a whole, the big banks lag smaller banks (79) and credit unions (87) by a substantial margin. We may see more big-bank image campaigns designed to address these issues.

For more:
- here's the release

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