We benchmark a cross-section of Australian banking — a blend of major banks, mutuals and challengers chosen to reflect the range of experiences Australians actually encounter when they open an account, apply for credit, refinance, or move their banking somewhere else.

The list is not fixed. Institutions are added over time as the market shifts and our coverage expands, so what you see this quarter is a starting point rather than a final word on who matters in Australian banking.

What no bank can influence is the result. Every institution is assessed against the same standard, scored the same way, and published exactly as measured — including when the numbers are unflattering. A score cannot be bought, improved on request, or withdrawn.

Every interaction is assessed against the Australian Contact Centre CX Standards — a national framework for evaluating both Agent Mastery (conversation quality across Engage, Discover, Educate, Close and Impact) and Accessibility (how easily customers can reach a live agent). The same scorecard is applied to every call, in every sector, every month.

We should be clear about scale. This is not a high-volume audit and we don't present it as one. We assess a consistent sample of calls to each institution every month, using the same method throughout, rather than attempting to survey a statistically representative slice of all calls made.

That is deliberate. Customers don't average their experience across hundreds of interactions — they form a lasting judgement from the one call they made. A consistent monthly sample is enough to expose the pattern behind that judgement: whether reaching a person is easy, whether the conversation is handled well, and whether either holds up quarter after quarter.

This report is free to read, and the results are published whatever they show. Banks that want the detail behind their own numbers — call recordings, competency-level scoring, and comparison against competitors they nominate — can find it through our Banking Benchmarking Services.