TORONTO — A new survey by J.D. Power indicates that this spring, nearly one in four customers of the major credit-card companies were unable to make monthly payments.
J.D. Power’s May and June survey of more than 6,700 credit-cardholders suggests that consumers whose income was dented during the pandemic were generally less satisfied with their credit-card companies.
The annual survey — which weighs factors such as benefits, credit-card terms, customer interaction and rewards — comes in the wake of COVID-19 accommodations that allowed some people to defer payments.
J.D. Power says that while overall credit-card satisfaction is flat compared with last year, people are less satisfied with credit-card companies’ online help and call centres.
The survey also indicated that wait times at credit-card companies’ call centres hit 12 minutes during the pandemic, compared with less than eight minutes prior to the pandemic.
The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2020
