Online customer service at Britain’s top 10 high street and internet banking web sites has sunk to new depths, according to a new study published by e-services provider Transversal.

The banks' web sites managed to provide answers to only 25 percent of the 10 most commonly-asked customer questions. Half of the banks were unable to provide any answers to online queries, even for straightforward questions such as, “Do you offer online banking?”

The results were worse than those of a similar study by Transversal in 2005, when only two banks failed to answer a single question, and the average number of questions answered was three.

The latest research also revealed that, though more than half of Britons now use online banking, 60 percent of banking web sites did not allow customers to contact them via email. Furthermore, those that offered email support took an average of 22 hours to respond.

One of the primary failings of the banks’ web sites was the inadequacy or absence of frequently asked question (FAQ) pages. Only half of the banks had FAQs and those that did often hid them in obscure corners of their site.

Transversal’s Dee Roche said that overly-generic banking web sites and FAQ pages could be partly to blame for the decline in online customer service over the past year.