US Tier 1 Banking App Rankings 2022 Year in Review
Executive Summary
US Bank takes out top spot in the US Banking App rankings in 2022. The App has been the consistent top performer every single month and has lead the Touchpoint Group Engaged Customer Score Rankings and wins our overall 2022 SURF Award for Security, Reliability, Usability and Functionality. Over the course of the year, the US Bank App has consistently had an overall Engaged Customer Score of 4.7 or 4.8 where other apps in this segment have struggled to keep a consistently high experience in place across the board.
Capital One closes the year out with yet another solid performance (ECS of 4.3) and a close 2nd to US Bank and snapping on the heels of CitiBank in the overall North America Rankings in the 3rd spot.
The award for the best recovery, however, goes to Truist. It is never easy merging two banks (the SunTrust and BB&T merger) and all the infrastructure that comes with it. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that there will be a large number of vocal customers that are not comfortable with the changes from their old way of doing things. Truist looks to have regained the trust of their customers and they've built that backup and that merge has been successful across the year. Across the year, Truist was ranked 14th, however, if we get Q4 they're ranked 12 and we look at December, they're ranked 7th, so they're jumping up the ranks as they move on so we expect good things for Truist in 2023.
PNC Bank finished the year overall in 9th but slipped back to a December ranking of 12th with customers continuing to highlight technical issues with features like payments (including Zelle) negatively impacting their experiences.
Overall, the tier 1 bank segment is strong in comparison to the overall US market and comparable to the top tier of apps globally. We expect to see big things in 2023 when it comes to investing in “In-App Experience,” as most institutions are becoming hyper-aware of cost control and mitigating churn risk. The better banks understand customers app experiences and feedback, the easier they can mitigate churn and reduce demand on call center operators.
We estimate for the Tier 1 banks, an effective program being implemented to monitor and learn from customer feedback can have up to a 2% reduction in churn and a 1-2% reduction in call centre costs (which can add up into the hundreds of millions of dollars saved or retained each year).
Video Transcript
0:05:00 – Glenn Marvin: Everybody, welcome back., it's 2023! Another Touchpoint Group Insight Session, and we're going to be looking at the US Tier One Banks 2022, the year in review, Tony Patrick, a big year and some standout performers.
0:23:07 – Tony Patrick: Yeah, definitely, Glenn. Thanks for that. So, your US Tier One. Today we're looking at U.S Bank Capital One PNC and Truist. And this time around, we'll get a comparison across all of North America to see how well these banks are doing in comparison to that group.
First of all, let's just jump in and do our standard. Now, what have the scores been doing?
What's been going on here? So, one of the things we always see is this consistency from U.S Bank and also from Capital One, so consistently at the top there above four and for the case of U.S Bank always above four and a half and around 4.75 so a very consistent view there. ,
Here we can seee what Truist has done with the SunTrust and BB&T merger they've actually, from my perspective, regained the trust of their customers and they've built that back up and that merge has been successful across the year so, that's a nice success story for them so let's move into a comparison across all of North America.
One of the things we can see here about these, this particular group of four: U.S Bank, Capital One, PNC and Truist is that the top two -U.S Bank and Capital One- are always sitting in that top three. So, very very positive and U.S Bank is actually leading across North America and has been for a long time and they're always staying in that number one position always about 0.2 ahead of Citibank just behind.
So, from my perspective that's a very positive thing, so a virtual award goes out to U.S Bank for their consistency and their leadership across the whole year.
Capital One as well, their consistency is also very positive, sitting around 4.3, 4.4 across the year. Even though they're sitting behind US Bank it's still very very high, and they've done very well across the year.
The third award, the virtual award I'd like to give out this time around is that improvement from Truist. It's always difficult in mergers to regain the trust of customers, and it looks like they are well on the way to actually doing a great job. So, even looking at the rankings here we can see that across the whole year, they're ranked 14th, then if we get Q4 they're ranked 12 and we look at December they're ranked seventh so they're jumping up the ranks as they move on so we expect good things for Truist in 2023.
Let's move forward into having a look at a bit of detail and what we can see here as to why each of these Banks has done so well or not so well. So, this is across the whole year.
One of the things we can see is this is our SURF Analysis. So looking at Security, Usability, Reliability and Functionality and you want these things to be as low as possible because these are all pain points, these are problems customers are having.
Now one of the stands outs across all of this is this 0.6% in Authentication issues for U.S Bank. That is very low, that's the lowest globally, and we saw for some other US Nationals that it was around 2.5% at 0.6 is very, very low, so they seem to have that under well under control, and this is why they're leading globally, the people can log in easily and not have issues.
Also, Reliability is at 2%, so very, very positive there. But of course, the other end of that, the likes of PNC and Truist, they still have room to improve.
Now of course, this is Truist across the whole year, and we know that in the past quarter, the past and last half of the year, they've done very well so this will actually be better for them in the second half of the year. So very positive there.
Let's move forward though, and have a look at how they're doing on each of the core Journeys. Now, these core Journeys are the things that customers think are important or the things they actually use and want to be using in a mobile app.
So here we're looking at things like Depositing Checks, Checking Account Balance, and Making P2P Payments, and we can see one of the things we should stand out is U.S Bank is really high there and we want this to be as high as possible because this is just the average score when people discuss that particular journey and they're sitting above four in every single case and well above it in a few of them as well so, very, very positive from U.S Bank and customers there are having a very good journey across each of these areas.
So let's have a look though at what they actually look like across the year, what is the sort of sentiment what's the view of what's going on with each of these apps?
US Bank
First of all, I'm looking at U.S Bank so they've done very well. So, obviously it's all green, it's all positive, they talk about Deposits, they talk about Good App Performance, Good Mobile Bank, they even bring up Journeys like Good Transfer Between Accounts, Good App Check Feature. Yeah, it's spontaneously bringing up Journeys and saying how good they are is a very positive thing for any bank. So very good from their perspective
Capital One
Let's move on to have a look at Capital One. One of the things we can see here is that although it's all mostly green there's a few things coming through like the Account Balance Feature, Checking Your Account Balance some of the basics and the Journeys aren't quite up to scratch, but again they're doing very well this is mostly green, very good, it's just a few small things to improve on.
PNC Bank
What about PNC? Let's have a look at PNC across the year. So here we see a very different story because there's the tale of the the two ends of the spectrum here. Here we can see there's things like you know particular things like Technical Issues stand out, Technology Issues, Poor Authentication and Login in here. And even some of the features, the Zelle payment feature is also a bit of an issue here. So, it's just showing there's some room- this is about room to improve, where could they actually make things better for themselves in 2023?
Truist
Let's have a look at Truist and how obviously they've done better in the second half of the year, but again we can see where they were having issues again. So, Technology Issues were also a problem for them. Poor Authentication, a few Bugs, but also some of the features weren't working as expected. So again, here there's the Report Check Deposit, a few Bugs coming through. So, obviously, they're doing very well, but there's always room to improve for them across the year. So, that's pretty much it for the year in review and some very positive things coming through with a few banks there. Thank you, Glenn.
6:45:07 - Glenn: Thanks, Tony. And as we're looking back to 2022 looking ahead to 2023 the theme that is coming through from many of the banks that we're dealing with is around cost savings and reducing their customer churn. So looking at this sort of data to improve that experience and keep those customers on board long term, is really, really critical likewise reducing that Call Center contact time which is going to reduce those internal costs as well. So, if anybody would like a copy of that large chart with all of that data in it feel free to sing out we're more than happy to send it out to you and have a great one. Enjoy!