The Consumerist blog continues its "Time to a Human" series with banks. Consumerist lackies have been phoning the call centers of 19 banks for the last four days, recording the hold times. Every time they do these surveys, the most notable thing is the one or two companies that have real trouble getting to the phones. Everyone else is clustered around 0-3 minutes of hold time per call.

So what do these surveys measure? Not much. We could try to tell you that Citibank must have a really overworked call center because they kept the Consumerist folks on hold for four minutes, but that's probably not true. The bar graph makes Citibank and US Bank look pretty bad, but the fact is, any wait under five minutes in barely noticeable.

In fact, look at day three: all wait times were under one minute, fifty five seconds. So the fact that MBNA had the longest time is meaningless.

On day two, Fidelity was last, with a mind-numbing three minute and twenty one second wait. And yet they gave the shortest wait on day four!

[We also blogged their previous surveys on airlines and mobile phone companies]

VocaLabs' SectorPulse reports on the mobile phone and financial industries, the latest of which are out now, are done using VocaLabs stable of panelists, who report quarterly on their personal experiences with their phone companies and banks.

Once again, Washington Mutual wallops the other institutions in customer satisfaction. And Citibank looks like it's been on a gentle slope to a zero customer satisfaction score from December to March. They actually appear to hit zero at the end of the quarter. What happened?

Call completion is a factor. VocaLabs' Peter Leppik said in a press release: "The continuing poor grades for Call Completion remain troubling in this industry. Repeat calls to complete a single piece of business frustrates customers and negatively impacts the financial performance of a customer service operation. Across all the financial services companies for which we have data, about one customer in three must call more than once, an unnecessary burden on both the customer and the company."

For the mobile phone industry survey, Verizon and T-Mobile are both doing very well in customer satisfaction. Per usual, Sprint PCS is doing terribly. Cingular struggles -- mostly successfully -- to overcome the poor ratings it inherited from joining AT&T.

[We blogged on the last SectorPulse report here.]