May 8, 2026
"Could you imagine being known as the woman who hung up on the Pope (1)?"
Father Tom McCarthy, a personal friend of Pope Leo XIV, said this while sharing a story about the Pope's struggles dealing with his bank's customer service.
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The Pope was trying to get the phone number changed for his bank account, which was held by a bank in his hometown of Chicago. Despite answering the security questions correctly, the customer service representative said he would have to come in to change the number, which he couldn't do.
"Would it matter to you if I told you I'm Pope Leo?" he said. The representative hung up on him.
Luckily for the Pope, he knew a guy who knew a guy. He was able to escalate the issue to the bank president and get his number changed; understandably, they didn't want to lose the Pope to another bank.
Pope Leo isn't alone in his customer service struggle — although most people don't have his connections to lean on. The J.D. Power Retail Banking Satisfaction Study shows that customers are beginning to show dissatisfaction with their banks' customer service options (2).
Here's what people are dissatisfied about — and what banks could do to fix it.
People are starting to "soft switch" their bank accounts more often
The 2026 J.D. Power study shows that customer satisfaction rates sharply declined in the second half of 2025. It says this decline shows "growing strain in the customer experience with phone, branch, online and automated customer support channels."
Customers are showing their dissatisfaction by slowly transferring money away from their primary account to another bank. 20% of retail customers are "soft switching" their accounts like this, up from 17% in the previous year.
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"Cracks are emerging at key points in the customer journey, which are opening the door to quietly establish new accounts with other institutions and gradually shift funds away from their primary bank," says Jennifer White, senior director of financial services intelligence at J.D. Power.
This could be because banks are increasingly using AI as part of their customer service approach, something that consumers are only fine with in specific circumstances.
According to a T.D. Bank survey, two-thirds of people were open to AI being used behind the scenes for things like fraud detection (3). But over 80% of people would prefer to be able to reach a human when they call the bank for customer support.
A 2023 report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that, even back then, chatbots were beginning to replace traditional call centers as banks' first-line customer support solution (4). This frustrated people, who were left to deal with nonhuman chatbots with no way to escalate.
"What is worse is there is not way [sic] to contact a person who can actually resolve the situation," said one CFPB complaint.
Even if there is a way to contact a human customer service representative, it can be complicated to figure out how. Some banks require you to enter your account information before moving forward; others have complicated and hard-to-parse phone trees that could lead to you being shuffled between customer service representatives when trying to find the right person to speak to (5).
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Many banks made customers sit through long wait times before they spoke to someone. If you didn't reach the right person, you'd have to get back in line and wait again.
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What banks can do to win back customers
Banks frequently use chatbots or other AI services because they're cost effective, quick and good at handling simple repetitive tasks (4). If banks want to improve their customer service scores, they don't have to get rid of AI as an option entirely: Almost half of people are open to using AI banking assistants for simple things like paying bills and setting alerts (3).
But banks might want to also offer well-staffed customer service lines for the customers who aren't comfortable using those tools, as well as for more complicated issues or financial questions.
White says one of the best ways banks can increase their customer service scores is to make it easy to solve any problems that come up. She says that banks that score high on customer service overall "are scoring strongly on resolving problem friction well (6)."
"Because sometimes when you have a problem, you know, a good resolution can actually result in higher customer experience satisfaction scores than never having the problem to begin with," she says.
Banks that successfully reduce problem friction will have happier customers; they'll also lose fewer customers to soft switching.
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
YouTube (1); J.D. Power (2); Customer Experience Dive (3),(6); Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (4); MyBankTracker (5)
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Kit Pulliam is a DC-based financial journalist with over five years of experience writing, editing, and fact-checking financial content.
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