September 2022 US National Banks App Performance Snapshot

Join us for the US banking app snapshot where we put Chase under the spotlight. With their whack-a-mole approach it comes as no surprise that there are plenty of issues to be addressed but can Chase get to the heart of the issue in time to reduce churn.

Will Chase customers wait it out or will they walk?

Chase has been consistently jumping up-and-down indicating their approach is one where they focus on immediate problems as they arise rather than looking to address the bigger problem behind the issues affecting their app.

Starting first with the SURF analysis tool that identifies the pain points in the four fundamental areas for an app: Security, Usability, Reliability, and Functionality, it is evident that Chase is experiencing issues across the board.

Tony takes us into the Functionality category to find out more about what the current issues are and takes us through a host of problems relating to user issues going on for Chase. Tony demonstrates the way Touchpoint Group’s Ipiphany software can go into the detail in the comments behind the scores, to pinpoint what is causing the issues and when they began. As we work through the issues affecting all four SURF pillars the bigger picture issue begins to reveal itself and we can identify the version of the app that requires Chase’s attention to rectify their customer pain points and address the myriad of issues affecting their Engaged Customer Scores (ECS).

With basic functionality affected for Android users, many not even able to log into the app it’s no surprise that Chase customers are expressing their anger and frustration through their comments, and churn risk being a very real expected outcome for Chase. Just how big of a problem is churn for Chase? Watch to the end to see a benchmark comparison across the category.

US National banks Engaged Customer Score (ECS) performance rankings for September 2022

How well does your banking app measure up in a benchmark comparison? Contact the team at Touchpoint Group today to request an insights session for your bank.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 - Glenn: Hello everybody and welcome to another Banking App Insights Session. We are focusing on the U.S Nationals in this session and in particular we're going to be looking at Chase Bank who, Tony Patrick, seemed to be playing whack-a-mole all yet again and feels like they're focusing on operational changes with the updates that are coming through rather than also including experiential changes, experiential feedback and we're going to have a look at the impact that's going to have on churn risk, aren't we?

00:00:34 - Tony: Yeah, definitely. So let me just jump in here. So if we have a look at today we're covering those U.S Nationals as you said. So that's Citibank, Bank of America Wells Fargo, and Chase - and today we're focusing on Chase. So let's look at a normal view which is looking at our Engaged Customer Score. So what I can do here is just have a look at the trends that are going on in here as well. So one of the things for those familiar with our series here Engaged Customer Score those customers giving both a score and a comment. And that allows us to show some really sensitive information as to you know why your score is moving and we know exactly why it's moving, not just not just a score. So in here let's have a look at a few things that are interesting here. So, from this group here Citibank is leading and they're consistently above 4.5 they have had a few dips across time but they're doing really well across time. So that's great for them.

The other end of the - like up there as well is Bank of America. They had a few blips at the end of last year but they're not quite as consistent as Citibank but as sort of you know they're keeping up there above that average for this group. And I'll just pick up on Wells Fargo which I've covered previously. They had their app updated around February this year. They're still, well, they're still recovering from that. The September numbers are still below 3.75 whereas prior to that update they were up above 4 so there's still room to improve. So it's a long term growth back from that dip in March for them. So they are growing though which is at least good. One of the things we're going to look at today is Chase. Now we've talked about this before but it's the thing that we like - I did partially predict it last week that - look at the trend, we can see is they do jump up and then a problem happens for a couple of months and then jump up again and come back down so Whack-a-mole is a great way to describe it. They're trying to just fix individual problems rather than understanding the overall app potentially about what they can do to improve that. So we'll look at today is why they've dropped in that September period so let's jump in and see.

So, what we're looking at now this is this is just Chase looking at August into September and what we're looking at here these are pain points. So these are all problems and I've put these in a more familiar order for those who are used to this is looking at what we call our SURF Analysis so looking at Security and Authentication Usability, Reliability, and Functionality - and of course because these are pain points the higher it is, the worse it is. And we can see they're across the board there's been a dip in what's going on or an increase in pain points across the board.
So one of the things we can do with this is actually jump in and see, you know, underneath each of these where it's gone wrong. But these things like Functionality has jumped up. Often we see things like Reliability actually go to a really big problem but here we see Functionality things have actually jumped up so there's sort of user issues going on in here.

So, let me just jump in here and actually have a look. I will jump in and have a look at a bit of detail on this sort of Functionality area. Two things that stood out for me was this area of Monitoring Account Activity and also Checking Account Balance. So what I can see here now again, I've switched now into a an Average Score so, lower is worse. So when you when you're going here from a 3.3 to a 2.7 you're dropping, so it's really interesting that that drops happen. So let's have a look at actually what's going on here. So if I select that I can go and get a bit of detail. So this is September for Chase in Monitoring Account Activity.

So again anything here that could be positive or negative because they're just talking about the topic, but most of, it's negative. And one of the problems here I can see is a problem with viewing transactions so if I just... I'll just do a little search here actually. Just see what's actually going on inside Transactions and what I can see is that there's a lot of stuff going: "People cannot see recent transactions" and what I might even do to go one step further is have a look at where that's coming from. So Operating System... Ban k- we know what the bank is but let's have a look. And what I can do then is attach to each comment I can actually see what's going on in here. And one of the things I can see in here is when the when we've got this Android version here, version 4.3.4 is the thing that's causing the issue in September. And you know again here: "It's an awesome app but I can't see transactions" um yeah so there's issues going on across the board, particularly for that version of the app. And what I can do is even just go into here and Benchmark that. So if I look at my benchmarks here I can jump in and see that it is that the variations of 4.3.4 and even just prior to that so there's issues going on with that app. So that's a problem there they need to resolve about viewing transactions which you think should be resolved and that's one of the purposes of an app so- a Banking App. Let me go back then into this area here and look at... One of the things is around Security and Authentication so you see that's also jumped up so there's more issues happening around there. Let's just step into that and what we can see is of the... let's go into actually examples because that's a really important thing to look at. And we can look at it from various perspectives but what I like to do is look at the really angry people those giving you the ones and twos for example. So what's going on inside there? So I can see here... well one of the basic things here: "Every day I log in it immediately logs me out" So imagine the frustration for that person and that obviously would happen to other people as well.

So even this person they try to use their set passwords, and try to use it but just spins and never logs in. "I can't log on it's useless I tried the phone and said it wasn't--- I tried the phone number and said it was not recognized" so this person has also tried to switch channels.

So, go to the Contact Centre. So, again if you're starting to cause issues that make people across channels into more expensive things to operate, that's a concern as well.

So again, issues here with trying to log in has caused an issue with the most recent version of the app. Let's have a look now at a bit of detail about that logging in. So let's have a look it's increased- logging in issues have doubled from 2.3% to 5.2%. So 1 in 20 people are talking about login issues which is not good across the board. Let's have a look here at some extra examples again of what's actually going on in there. Even this person-- this person gave a 5 they're also saying: "Recently it will not let me sign on so it doesn't recognize my username and password" So it's really clear issues going on in there for Chase. Now let's... one of the interesting things about all of this is we can step forward into what is one of the outcomes of this is potentially customers leaving and what we've seen if there's continued frustration across many months, you tend to see customers more and more talking about how they're going to leave. Now, again not everyone tells you that so the numbers here are reasonably low. We're hitting up to around 2% in this case for Chase and it gets down to about 0.6 of things like that in some months. But in general it's sort of averaging about 1.3. Now one of the things we find is that, you know, obviously it's a very small percentage of people who are leaving actually say they're going to leave actually do it. But again there's a lot of people not saying they're going to leave, they don't tell you they're going to leave and they actually leave so this is only the tip of the iceberg about what's happening. And what we can do though is have a look-- is this number good or bad? Now one of the things we can see is this scale goes down to about 0.4 and it never dips below that for Chase. But if I Benchmark this against other banks in here, let's have a look at what we see in here. So across the board if I look at it from a frequency perspective, frequency of people saying they're going to leave to some for some reason I can see that across this year, Wells Fargo, and Chase are both at the top at 1.3%. Again, as I said it's a low number but it's three times the level we're getting for these other players here and again it's only the tip of the iceberg of what's going on. You want to restrict this to below 0.5 otherwise you're having a real problem.

And these people are saying they're going to leave because of the app not because of something else. So it's a good thing to actually understand how you stop people from leaving just because of your app experience. So, thank you Glenn.

00:09:07 - Glenn: Yeah great insights there. Amazingly though 1.3% percent of 50 million customers is over half a million that's about 650 000 customers and they're only the ones that are talking about it.

Awesome, well if you want to have a chat to us about your App and how you can improve your experience and reduce that churn, sing out. Cheers team.