US Bank, Citibank, and Capital One all continue to lead the US Rankings, while Truist and PNC and on the rise. Fifth Third's woes continue as it struggles with recent updates and is bottom of the pack.
Wells Fargo has finally managed to get back to the levels they were at in Jan 2022 after a long recovery from the major update to the app in Feb 2022, and if they continue the good work should bring the ap Engaged Customer Score to up over 4.0 in 2023 which is where a bank of this size and stature really needs to be to compete with its peers.
Truist is also back on the rise after a dip in October and November and has recently pushed the Engaged Customer Score up over 4.0 which is bringing it close to the first class teritory that Capital One and Citbank sit in.
A newcomer to the rankings, Discover Financial has consistently had positive feedback from customers which puts them in the top tier, however they have struggled to get over that magical number in ECS of 4.5. Discover have consistently been in the top 4-5 performers across the core areas of Security and Authentication, UI and Design, Reliability and Functionality. The one journey we see the biggest opportunity for Discover is in Cheque deposits where feedback is unusually more negative than those of its relative ranking peers so, if they prioritise improvements in this area, they could make that leap to the next level.
Touchpoint Group collates this customer intelligence utilizing advanced AI and natural language understanding in its proprietary analytics platform to analyze over a million banking app reviews each year in its global ECS index.
Touchpoint Group processes customer feedback data captured using internal customer experience platforms and sources. Data is updated daily, with insights available to identify issues for Operational teams, monthly reporting for Leadership teams, and a Mobile Customer Experience Analytics (MCXA) report published quarterly for Executive leaders to benchmark performance by category and against the best in banking app performance.
US Banking App Insight Session Transcript
00:05 - Intro by Glenn.
00:37 - US Bank Categories Intro
01:00 - Engaged Customer Score Ranking Chart
01:54 - US Tier 1 Banks Market Insights
03:11 - US National Banks Market Engaged Customer Score (ECS)
04:58 - US Regional Banks Market Engaged Customer Score (ECS)
06:05 - SURF Analysis
10:54 - Journeys Review
12:57 - Final comments by Tony & Glenn
00:05 - Intro by Glenn.
Glenn: -Hello everybody and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session, and for 2023 we have made another great change to this. After requests from many of you in the banking Community, we're going to combine the data sets and we're going to look at the entire US market. And we will be able to change things up a little bit and have a look at it and drill down into each of the different areas. But, Tony, you've done a fantastic job yet again of innovating this Insight Session and looking forward to seeing how things play out across the entire Market in the US.
00:37 - US Bank Categories Intro
Tony: -Great, thank you, Glenn. Yeah, as Glenn mentioned, we're covering off the U.S Nationals, U.S Tier ones, and U.S Regionals together just to see how they stack up against each other so, a fair bit of benchmarking throughout this presentation.
So, let's move forward into it and look at our standard look, we looked at this at the end of last year or in January just to see what happened across last year to start with so give us some context before we step into what's happened in January.
01:00 - Engaged Customer Score Ranking Chart
So, some of the big things we saw were of course, there's these three at the top US Bank, Citibank and Capital One sitting there consistently, well into the 4, and for US Bank nearing 5, so very, very positive for the top three here. We see some movements though down lower, for example, TD, hit slightly softening at the end of 2022 let's see what happened into 2023.
Also, we can see that Fifth Third dropped away in November-December, and we know why that happened last time, because of the App update. But let's also have a look at that what's the impact into January as well, how has that moved forward? And also we'll see how the movements of the remaining banks have gone as well. So let's step forward and see what's going on.
Now, one of the things we can't do is show you all of those banks at once, although they're all available in this data set, one of the things is that there are too many things going on at that point.
01:54 - US Tier 1 Banks Market Engaged Customer Score (ECS)
So, let's have a look to start with these here, we've got Capital One, PNC, Truist, and U.S Bank. Now, one of the things I can see here is PNC was on the rise, so, basically, you know, you could have predicted potentially at the end of November last year, it could have sort of, you know, hit Capital One if it increased that level, but it's now down to around 3.5 for two months in a row. So, they're struggling with this but they need to obviously pick themselves up back to where they were in October-November. Probably they can just check back to what version of the app was there and then update things from there.
We can also see Truist has again -that's on the rise as well, that's doing very well in terms of that movement... Had that dip in November and October but it's really pushed up above 4, so again there's potential again for Truist to lift itself up to that next level into Capital One, which both PNC and Truist haven't done for a very long time. And of course, US Bank is always at the top here, this is our global Benchmark leader so very positive still for US Bank.
What I can do though, is to switch across... now, what I'll do with this score as well is just explain-
03:11 - US National Banks Market Engaged Customer Score (ECS)
-I'll just jump into U.S Nationals here and apply that. Of course, this score is for those who have watched this series for a while, this score is what's called the Engaged Customer Score (ECS) so what we're looking at here is those customers who've given both a score and a comment. And what the power of that is that when you get a score and a comment, we know exactly what needs to change to improve, for example, so we know why the movements are happening, and that's the power of what's sitting inside here, that every person here has also given a comment.
Let's have a look here at what's going on. So Wells Fargo, we've seen that for a long time, that dip in March, but that's recovered up to the levels it was in January last year, so hopefully they can move forward because they have made changes to the UI, and hopefully, they can move forward again and lift themselves up to that level around 4.
One of the things we saw was of course, Chase had that up-and-down movement, but what we see here is that it's actually dipped down into November, and it hasn't really recovered from that yet, it's moving in the right direction but it's still struggling. So, interesting to what's happening there.
Now, one of the other things which we'll look at in a moment is Discover Financial. We haven't focused on that before but it does very well.
In fact, it's sitting there amongst the top 3 or 4 in the US. But, you can see there it's actually struggled over the past sort of 8 months or so where it hasn't got above that 4.5 When I say struggled, it sits to it doing very well but, it was doing better previously.
And, of course, Bank of America is sitting there in a similar spot as well. So we'll come back to discover Financial and also Citibank in a moment.
04:58 - US Regional Banks Market Engaged Customer Score (ECS)
So one look also here, is looking at the Regionals. So let's bring these in. So in a moment, we'll also do some benchmarking against all of these as well on various topics.
So a lot of change going on inside here, a lot of action. Now, one of the things we'll look at in a moment is Fifth Third, and it's obvious that's dropped away, and it's maintained that low point. Now, obviously, on a scale of 1 to 5 from the App Store and Android stores the lowest you can get is 1, you can't get below 1 because it's the lowest score there; they're sitting at around 1.3 or around there somewhere. So obviously there's trouble for customers sitting there as well. Now, one of the things we saw was TD had softened at the end of last year, sort of dropping away. That hasn't gone down any further, which is good, but there's still recovery room left for them. They're still in January sitting at 2.75, whereas, as you can see, they were sitting up around 4 most of last year. So what I'll do now is just have a look -we saw that Fifth Third had dropped away in the last three months, has dropped away because of that app update.
06:05 - SURF Analysis
So what we're going to look at here is -we're going to look at what are the numbers we've got here across our SURF Analysis. Just so you're aware of what the SURF Analysis is, it's looking at these four key areas of pain points, so these are all problem areas. Security and Authentication, Usability, Reliability and Functionality. So where are the problems coming through here? One of the things we can see is that in that last three-month period, Functionality issues were at 47.8% so 48% issues, and that's gone up from the three months prior to that where the app release hadn't happened, by 20 points. So was it around 27, it's got up towards 50 now. So it's a very -it's a big jump.
The biggest jump, though is Usability, that's gone from it's gone up by 28 points from the previous three months period, so that's a massive leap into what's going on there. So actually, it's good to see actually what's going on, so one of the things we can see if I go into Usability, one of the things we can see inside that. Just on the right when this right panel comes up.
So on here, Usability. We can see some: "App difficult to use" has gone from about 6% up to 26% so a big, big jump, so let's see what's inside that. We can actually see what's going on for these customers. So, on the right, we can see pretty much a lot of it's around the update. There's an app update that is difficult to use.
"It's difficult to use, make it more user-friendly". So, in essence, there's a really big issue with that app update. "Somehow managed to make the app even more confusing, I hate having to click an extra step" So it seems like there's a lot of extra process for customers to go through to get through into what they're trying to achieve.
So that's interesting, so that's probably pretty clear to Fifth Third. But what might not be as clear if we have a look across this Functionality area there are a few other things going on. So obviously, things like Poor App Navigation have also gone up from about 0.4% to about 3.6.
But other things are also popping up, so, for example... Poor App Widget Feature. Now again, this is only little murmurings of what's going on here. But again, there are people here saying, "I can't see my available balance on the widget screen", bring back the ability to add a widget to check our balances" so they've taken some Functionality away, and customers don't like that, they're clearly having a problem. And I've also seen issues with speed as well so underlying these UI things there are also other things going on, so hopefully, Fifth Third can get a grasp on what's happening there.
So let's move away from Fifth Third for a moment and then onto these two here, so Discover Financial is sitting there nicely but it's always behind Citibank, so let's actually isolate those two. Let's have a look; what's going on in there? So essentially, we can see there's a gap. Now, it's not much of a gap, it's continuous there's always been a gap between the two across the past year. Let's understand why that's happening.
So what I'll do with that is move into looking at our SURF Analysis so remember here, lower is better. We want a lower frequency of these problems coming through. So for the first view here, you can see Discover Financial in blue here is actually higher overall compared to Citibank so very interesting.
But is that bad? So we can see Reliability is 8.9%, and if I click on that there and on the right panel, what we can see there is this is the ranking across all the banks across the US that we're covering in this particular data set, and remember, lower is better.
US Bank is performing the best, they only have 5% of their customers in the past few months or this is looking at over the past year actually mentioning anything about Reliability issues, so 5% is really, really good. Discover Financial is only about 9 so they're good as well; they're in that top 5 so very, very positive as compared to others which are sort of getting more than a third of the customers talking about Reliability issues, so very, very strong. And similarly, for Authentication and Security, so logging in type area issues.
Let's have a look at how these two compare to the market. So again, we've got Discover Financial sitting there at number 4 in terms of best at the bottom here. US Bank, at only 1% mentioned login issues so it's a very, very positive for them, but again, Discover Financial is doing very well even though it hasn't quite caught up to Citibank.
So, this is interesting. These are just these pain points, but how are they doing across Journeys?
10:54 - Journeys Review
So this view here is looking at the past five months looking at -now, what I might do here if I just switch this to just look at Citibank. So across the first five months, how are Citibank and Discover Financial compared to each other? Now again, we're switching here, this one here, a higher score is better. So this is looking at the ratings of those customers discussing these topics around, for example, Checking Account Balance, Monitoring Account Activity, Paying Bills, Depositing Cheques, for example, all the basic functions you want out of an app, how well these Banks performing? We see that Citibank is above Discover on everything. They're doing very well and everything, so that's only a small gap. So, it's just a small improvement from Discover to actually get to that level.
Now one of the things we can see here is it's actually -Discover is actually a fair bit lower than Citibank for Cheque Deposits. So I think there are some improvement things there that Discover can do. One thing we can also do instead of comparing Discover to Citibank, we can get compare Discover to all of the U.S. markets we've seen and see how they compare in each of these things. So Discover is doing very well across all of these measures so, basically, Checking Account Balance, Monitoring Account Activity, and all the basic stuff except on the right here, we can see Depositing a Cheque via the App is actually underperforming compared to the market.
So Discover Financial can improve there to bring that score up to a higher level. And again we can actually see here how Discover Financial ranks compared to others, let's have a look at that in our benchmarking on the right. What we can see there is that the best of the bunch up here is U.S Bank, Wells Fargo, and Citibank doing very well on Cheque Deposits but, Discover Financial is down at 13th so some room to improve for them there definitely.
12:57 - Final comments by Tony & Glenn:
Tony: - So... A fair few things there covered Glenn, but I think there's some room for even those near the top to actually get up to that next level, there's always something to find to improve.
Glenn: - Yeah, and fascinating looking at that Discover Financial piece as well, where it's really helping identify that singular area that they can focus on to get the biggest impact in regards to that experience for its customers. So, thank you very much, folks, for joining us for yet another Insight Session, we're looking forward to producing these for 2023 and beyond. Hope you like the new format, and if you want to have a chat more than happy to talk to you about your individual bank and what you can do to improve your app experience.