Compare the results of the recent Millward Research on the Net Promoter Scores of some of Britain's biggest banks with their profits and you are in for a shock.

All the worst performing banks are reporting the biggest profits. Eh?

The reason is BAD PROFITS.

Over the last few days we have seen some of the big British banks announcing very impressive profits. On Wednesday HBOS, the bank formed by a merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, reported a 19% rise in annual pre-tax profit to £5.71bn. Their namesake brand The Royal Bank of Scotland did even betterl with a 16% increase in profits to £9bn.

We also had Barclays  achieving a 35% rise in pre-tax profits to £7.14bn. Meanwhile Lloyds TSB's profits were up 11% to £4.25bn.

But if you were reading Marketing last week you would have discovered that all these brands were featured among the VERY LOWEST when it comes to their Net Promoter Scores. This all important metric provides a single score (out of 100) for how positive its customers are about the company and its offerings. 

In the case of RBS (+15), Halifax (+12), BOS (+10) Lloyds TSB (+8) and Barclays (-3) all five were among the lowest 20 net promoter scores in Britain. One quarter of the worst performing marketing orientations, poorest customer focus, service delivery. Barclays was actually dead last!

 If you know anything about Net Promoter scores you will know that the scores are very strongly correlated to business performance. And yet in the case of our three banks we apparently have low Net Promoter Scores, and very big profits. How is that possible?

 The answer is what Fred Reichheld (below), the inventor of Net Promoter Scores, calls Bad Profits. When a company makes too much money for its shareholders by extracting value from its customers it makes a lot of money - in the short term. But sit tight. Screwing value from customers, rather than making value for the company by making value for customers, will eventually come back and get you.

Lets come back and check the results in 5 years time. By then the poor service, unhappy customers, acquisition costs, bad word of mouth, and customer churn that go hand in hand with low Net Promoter Scores will kick in.

Unless some of these companies take some of their enormous profits and return them back to their customers, the people who pay for everything, in the form of better products and services. Not advertising or a swanky new brand campaign - more service staff, lower charges, better value.

Watch this space.