This month in the US regional banks category we put Regions under the microscope to find out what is affecting their user experience so dramatically.
Big issues for Regions affecting the core SURF pillars – are they overwhelmed or just oblivious?
From November 2021 we can see that Regions Engaged Customer Scores (ECS) was sitting above 3.5 fairly consistently, however the scores have dropped significantly in the past few months, giving us cause for concern.
Looking specifically at that big drop in the period from May to July, the SURF analysis tells us how well the app is performing the 4 fundamental areas for an app, these being Security, Usability, Reliability and Functionality. Here we see that Regionals has issues right across the board, with numbers of problems doubled in almost every area and Reliability being the category affected the most.
Tony uses the Customer Journeys analysis, to look at the ways these are being impacted. By comparing the same date period, we can see, again, issues across every area. To find out what the pain points relating to the core issue of Reliability are, Tony turns our attention to to those low Engaged Customer Scores where we can see exactly what the themes and issues are affecting the app users. Better still, with the level of detail provided in the customer feedback data, Tony demonstrates the ways that Touchpoint Group’s Ipiphany software can mine for very specific information, to see just what Regionals need to be looking for in addressing these issues.
And let’s hope they do, because as we learn from this snapshot into Regions ECS data analysis, there are some key issues that Regions need to fix first, not having the app crash every time users open it would be a great start. And only then, will Regions be able to start to understand where the other problems are lurking.
This month’s snapshot demonstrates how any bank, business or organisation can use customer feedback to identify and prioritise the key things that they need to do to make the biggest difference.
U.S. Regional banks Engaged Customer Score (ECS) performance rankings for August 2022
There’s no need to feel overwhelmed nor any excuse to keep your head in the sand. Turning your customer feedback data into key business intelligence and actionable insights is just a phone call away. For a personalised look at your bank's app performance contact Touchpoint Group today.
Full Transcript
00:00:02 – Glenn: Everybody welcome back. Glenn Marvin here from Touchpointgroup.com and yet another Insight Sessions looking at the US Banking market. In this particular session, we are looking at the US Regional Banks and we are going to be focusing on Regions.
In August really what we want to focus on is some of the issues with fundamental features and functions that they have that are impacting some really core journeys. And that User Experience flow-on effect on their Engaged Customer Score and we'll know that if their Engaged Customer Score is going down, there's churn risk and a whole lot of things that they should be doing to rectify it.
Tony Patrick, welcome back and let's get into it.
00:00:54 – Tony: Great. Thank you, Glenn. Yeah, as Glenn mentioned today US Regionals, so that covers TD Bank, Regions, Fifth Third, Citizen's, Key Bank and Huntington. Let's jump straight in at one of the first views we'd like to look at because it gives us a really good perspective on the market.
Now, what we are looking at here is the Engaged Customer Score now a bit of spaghetti there because some of these brands are doing some interesting things across time. But, what we can see- just a refresher for those who are new to this- is the Engaged Customer Score looks at those customers giving both a score and a comment. By looking at the data that way what we see is real movement in what's going on. So, we don't just see a flat piece of information just going across and then the score sits at 4.5 or 4.6; we see real things going on. So, if you see a dip in these numbers something real has happened and you need to address it. If you see things going up, it means your initiatives are actually doing something. But, let's have a look here at what's going on.
So what I can do is have a look at here, at Regions. That's the one I want to focus on today. Now, there has been a big pick-up in August for Regions but that's off the back of a fairly major drop from April. It has taken a few months, three months to get down to that low point in July and now the pickup is happening. But what actually happened in that May, June and July period to turn it around so badly?
So we can see there that Regions was sitting above 3.5 consistently from November last year, apart from some problems at the end of last year. But, it looked like it was actually competing with the best, with those Regional Banks. But it has dropped dramatically in those past few months as I mentioned. So let's have a look and see what might have happened inside there.
The first view or one of the first views we would like to look at, is looking at this area of SURF Analysis. This is looking at the four key areas of Security and Authentication, Usability, Reliability and Functionality. Functionality is functionality in features and things like that in your app. What this does because these are pain points we want that frequency to be as low as we can. This is a really strong indicator of where you are having problems and where you need to focus.
Now what we are looking at here is looking at that March and April, that pre-drop period into that May to July, that drop period we saw for Regions. And we can see some already so there's some clear differences here. So, across the board. Reliability problems have more than doubled. The same with Functionality issues, Security and Authentication issues have gone up four times and some Usability problems have doubled there as well. But, one of the biggest problems is this Reliability. It's sitting at 1 in- about 1 in 2 customers giving this feedback are talking about some sort of Reliability problem. Which is massive compared to around 1 in 5 in the previous period. So let's have a look, understand first of all, how this Reliability is impacting things. Let's have a look at a bit of detail underneath that.
One of the things we often see when where there's Reliability problems, we often see things like bugs and crashes and things like that tend to grow. Here we can see it growing to some extent but crashes have gone from like 1 to 2%. So it's not necessarily crashes going on with the app, bugs have gone up from 2 to 3.5 so nearly double. So, some bugs in there. But it looks like just things aren't working because of these technical issues are having as a problem, they're gone from 18% to 50 odd percent. So, problems sitting inside there. But, the thing is with this we want to see how this is impacting the other journeys.
So let's have a look at particular journeys that are going on for Regions. So again, we're looking at that period pre that drop and then during and to the end of that drop. And what we're looking at here is just some general topics, some core journeys and what the score was. So we can see prior to that drop, Checking Account Balance, which is a core and very fundamental piece of Banking App Functionality was 2.7 so not that it could be higher but again, we see it's dropped down to 1.6 so that's a reasonable drop showing issues have suddenly started occurring in that area across that period. We can see other things reasonably flat we see Monitoring Account Activities dropped but that's like, that lines up somewhat with Checking Account Balances they're two types of journeys that are lined up together closely. Paying Bills Via App has gone up slightly but the thing I want to focus on as well is this Depositing Checks Via the App has also dropped away.
Now one of the things when you look at these types of problems like Checking Your Account Balance you want to see things like: How can I improve that journey? What particular things can make that journey better? Are there fewer steps customers can do or there are different ways of doing it? But what you tend to find when you get Reliability problems is you end up with I'll just focus here actually on the really negative things just in here, the ones and twos just to get us down to a bit of detail. What you find in here is that "It's unreliable" for example. And here... this time here: "Every time I opened the app to check my balance it will not even open" so it's not just the fact that the journey isn't working it's a fact these Reliability problems are overwhelming the app. This person "It's difficult to access their app" this person's got 5g and they can't even log in to see their balance so you've got one of the problems with this is you don't even see problems with your journey. This actually might be happening. It's overwhelmed with these issues about it actually doesn't work in the first place.
So that's a clear thing for Regions to focus on is, get those Reliability issues picked up. Get your login issues fixed up. Then you can start to understand where your problems are with these journeys. Otherwise, customers are just being overwhelmed with not being able to log in and it just doesn't work as expected. What I can also look at here is the idea of Depositing Checks which can be a big problem if it doesn't work let's focus on here let's have a look
the inconvenience of not being able to do Mobile Checks, regularly make deposits. So the remote deposit is only an early option "website useless for me since I'm unable to use mobile deposit on the web", "I love the Mobile Deposit feature but now I'm unable to sign in" so it looks like people are trying to use this particular feature but it's not working as expected. Now again it's not a major thing. It's only dropped from 2.8 to 2.4 but the types of things you want to be looking at is, things like this one here for example "the app actually freezes and logs you out when they take the first picture". It's stuff like that you want to watch for next time around to see Is this a growing issue? or Is it something we need that is actually being fixed across time? So again, a lot of these issues coming through here about these declines in Checking Account Balance have come from Reliability problems that need to be addressed in the first place before we can fine-tune that journey.
00:08:19 – Glenn: Fantastic insights there, Tony. And the other great thing about being able to get so granular with this is if we chose to, we could go even more granular on that and look at the Operating System that person was using, whether it's an iOS or whether it's an Android piece. So, if you're a product manager or if you're on that tech side of it you can very, very quickly isolate: Is it actually part of the dev problem? Or: Is it due to one of those Operating System updates that is starting to impact and things like that?
So, yet again some fantastic insights there and just really highlighting how some of those fundamental core areas in the app if you can't get them quite right can have devastating impact on so many of those other features and journeys that people are trying to utilize.
Thanks again for tuning in for yet another Insight Session and more than happy to have a chat if you want to have a deep dive session in regards to your own banking app and we will see you next month with even more insights. Thanks, team.