Most people are willing to trade a digital banking relationshipfor a personal one, according to a recent Gallup poll of 6,000banking customers.

The survey asked customers the question “If you had to give upone aspect of your relationship with your bank, the digital (you would no longer be able to interact with yourbank through mobile or online channels) or the personal (you wouldno longer be able to visit a branch or call a call center), whichone would you give up?”

According to the survey, 53% said they would give up theirpersonal banking relationship; 47% said they would give up theirdigital relationship.

It's not that black and white, however.

“Given the amount of time the industry spends talking aboutmoving everything to digital, it is easy to think that to betterengage our customers we must keep evolving digital at the expenseof everything else,” Gallup Senior Consultant Beth Youra wrote. “And yes, it is truethat digital channels must continue to evolve, both from a customerexperience perspective and from an internal bank IT and operationsperspective. But if we dig a bit beyond the sensationalizedheadlines that even I am guilty of writing to get your attentionfor this article, a more nuanced picture emerges.”

There is no question that online banking is the norm for manypeople. For example: 71% of people in the survey said they paid abill through online banking in the last three months and 21% usedmobile deposit. But the move to digital does appear to havelimits.

“While millennials will continue to drive channel use and transactionsmore toward digital (I can imagine a day when the deposit a checkby RDC and deposit a check in a branch numbers are reversed), theyalso haven't had or are just starting to have the life experiences(buying a house, having kids, helping with aging parents, etc.)that generally make people either want to use personal channels orhave no choice but to use personal channels,” Youra wrote.

Most people use three or four banking channels, the surveyfound, and only 11% said they would prefer their bankingrelationships to be exclusively digital, Gallup found.

But the bottom line, Youra said, is that financial institutions“need to be perfect in every single interaction with customers –every single time. You need to let customers interact with youthrough the channels they want – digital or personal – but you mustalso go out of your way to ensure a satisfying customer experiencein each of those channels. Engagement drops when customers don'tinteract with their bank in the way they want to, but it also drops– by 40% – when they give a less-than-perfect satisfaction score toeven one of the channels they use.”