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The paper uses a questionnaire and a theoretical model of bank‐customer interaction preferences as the basis for examining the perceptions of retail bank customers regarding the use of remote delivery channels and the extent to which they still value traditional branch‐based face‐to‐face interactions. The empirical evidence suggests that despite the increase in remote banking, retail bank customers still place significantly greater emphasis on face‐to‐face contact. The implications of this finding are that if banks want to encourage widespread customer adoption of remote banking they must better understand customer attitudes towards alternative delivery channels and use this information to educate their customers on the tangible service benefits which emanate from remote delivery.

Locality management devolves the responsibility for the delivery of community health and social services to “localities” of some 25,000‐30,000 people. States that unit general managers wanted to measure the clients’ perception of the quality of the service provided. Research resource constraints limited the study to the elderly in receipt of at least one statutory service and the carers. Describes how a survey of 410 elderly was carried out by interview in their place of residence and a postal survey of carers based on the same criteria was conducted which yielded 221 usable responses. Analyses show considerable variability within the two groups across the criteria with informational needs scoring least well by a considerable margin in both. Comparing scores between the two groups shows that carers were much less satisfied than the elderly clients with scores in general being about 30 points lower for all criteria.

Technological advances have made a significant impact on the banking sector in recent years, with a key development being the introduction of technological and remote channels of interaction. While some research has been undertaken to establish the level of acceptance by customers of these channels, most of this research has examined retail banking customers’ attitudes to, and adoption of, remote interaction channels. This paper reports the findings of a study which has investigated channel preferences amongst corporate customers of a leading retail and corporate bank in the UK. Specifically, it seeks to differentiate between smaller business customers and larger customers. The key findings are that all customers prefer personalised interaction and that smaller customers, who are generally less profitable for banks than large clients, show relatively less willingness to embrace technological means of communication and to insist on personal interaction with their bank.