Executive Summary
The March 2023 US Banking App Insights session covers off the overall Engaged Customer Score performance rankings for Banking Apps and dives deeper into the performance challenges and opportunities for of USAA and Discover Financial.
The top 3 apps in the US market have retained their rankings in March with Capital One making good gains to outrank Santander US and move into third spot.
In the March insights session we dive deeper into the performance of USAA and Discover Financial apps which have both faced challenges and had dips in performance.
USAA
Core reliability and functionality Issues impacting customer experience.
41% of customers giving feedback mentioning functionality and 42% reliability with negative sentiment. Two features highlighted in this feedback are: App Payment and Money Transfer features, focus on these create an opportunity to improve experience and lift overall performance & customer feedback.
Paying bills via the app feature negatively impacting the rating by .14 points and ability to monitor account activity negatively impacting overall score by .23.
Discover Financial
This app has also experienced negative sentiment around Functionality and Reliability.
One core feature highlighted in this feedback was App Alerts and in particular, Push Notification issues that create an opportunity to improve experience and lift overall performance & customer feedback.
Capital One
This app has had a great lift in performance however there are still oportunities to be found to consolidate rankings and CX.
While the overall ranking has lifted to 4th in the US market, the App Payment feature ranks 7th and App update processes and opening and authentication journeys are two areas that can be improved that will have a greatest impact on engaged customer score.
Video Transcript
00:04 - Intro by Glenn
01:42 - Engaged Customer Score Overview
02:29 - US Tier One segment
03:57 - US Regional Banks Segment
05:17 - SURF Analysis
06:05 - Contribution Chart & Metrics
07:35 - USAA SURF Analysis Detail
09:07 - Discover Financial SURF Analysis Detail
10:32 - Customer Journeys
12:35 - Final words by Glenn
00:04 - Glenn: Hello everybody, and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Insight Session. We're looking at the U.S Banks, and today Tony is going to take us through another perspective of how you can look at your data and the feedback that your customers are giving you.
Now, overarching scores and rankings and everything like that is one thing, but what Tony's going to do is just highlight how you can actually dig a little bit deeper and that one, two, three or even four layers down to uncover what experiences with what parts of your app that your customers are having that can either negatively drag that experience down or positively reflect the great experience that they're happening. And then, how you can then use that data to prioritise your focus on app enhancements over the coming months. Tony, over to you.
01:03:18 - Tony: Great. Thank you, Glenn. A great introduction because I think it's really important to understand is that the high-level score is interesting, but that's as far as it goes. You need to then go down to that detail to make those decisions.
Today we're looking at these three key areas: U.S Nationals, U.S Tier Ones and U.S Regionals.
01:42 - Engaged Customer Score Overview
Let's just jump in and look at our normal perspective on what we cover to start with. We do normally look at this-we normally look at the actual scores across times. This is the past 12 months. How these scores have been moving. Now, one of the important things I like to reiterate here is that, this is what we call our Engaged Customer Score. These are customers who've given both a score and a comment in either the app store or the Android store.
What's important there is if we see any movements here up or down, we know exactly why because everyone who's part of that contribution to that movement has given us some comments in there, so we know why things have moved. Even the smallest movement of a 0.1 movement, we can be really clear about what's actually happened.
That's really important and the reason that's really important is the purpose of looking at this is to make decisions. If something is moved down you can then go away and understand that detail underneath these things as to why that's moved so you can make changes to improve that score.
02:29 - US Tier One segment
Here just briefly, I'm looking across the market here, and we can see U.S Bank is still doing very well seeing above 4.75, I won't look at that in too much detail.
There are two at the bottom here, one is PNC and that seems to be doing reasonably well gets above 4 sometimes then drops down below 3.5. Inconsistency for PNC is part of the problem they do you know pick things back up reasonably quickly but that inconsistency is sort of causing a problem for customers there. The other one which also as you can see is inconsistent is Truist. A bit of a jump up and down.
We see there in November the decline and then the pickup again so that's great, but that inconsistency is not -it's in the past, have been a lot better at making those improvements consistently so you need to watch out there as well. We'll look at a bit more detail later at Capital One and some others as well. Let's have a look at the U.S Nationals. One of the big standouts here is USAA where there's been a drop in from about 3 and now sitting about 2 on average. We're gonna have a look into as to why that's happened.
What makes them different to others? What makes that such a problem for them to overcome?
Another one is looking at -you can see there are a few sort of movements going around. We can see that Wells Fargo is sitting up there nicely they've dropped it down again in March. Just a brief look at what's going on in the market. Chase has also picked up. They've actually went below 3, they've picked up over the past three to four months and doing pretty well there.
03:57 - US Regional Banks Segment
Okay. Let's look at -this is our U.S Regionals. I won't dwell too much on Fifth...
We talked to them at least before about UI issues and things like that, but again they need to turn things around. I was hoping to have this turned around in February, it's still low now... Fifth Third, if you don't reach out and get to some underlying detail around this... -just reach out.
Another one is also TD, which is dropped in October and continues to remain below that 3 level and in fact, it's the lowest it's been over the past 12 months and way back beyond that at around 2.5. Some issues going on there. What I want to look at is a few particular banks to compare and contrast. I picked a few here. So, we talked about USAA and we'll focus on that we'll also have a look at Capital One which is doing reasonably well but it's sort of flattened off from its peak in the middle of -or the end of last year which was hitting near 4.5 so, some issues there.
Discover Financial as well and we see here the first time it's dropped away below that 4 level in a very long time so... What's going on there?
Let's have a look and also we'll have a look at those inconsistencies from PNC, so let's quickly jump forward and get into that straight away.
05:17 - SURF Analysis
Okay, one of the first views we'd like to look at is this area we like to call our SURF Analysis, looking at Security, Authentication, Usability, Reliability and Functionality.
One of the things about this score is you want to get this frequency as low as possible. You want to have those scores down because these are problems. For example, Reliability, we can see that this is the latest month -this is March at 46% of the feedback for USAA was about Reliability. Clearly, that's just overwhelming the conversation coming through from customers and overwhelming the experience that's going on and this often flows through to things like, things not working, the whole usability is an issue as well and also logging in is also a problem for them, so that's interesting. But what's the impact of that though?
I can see here -this interesting 46%, but what does it do in terms of my impact to my score?
06:05 - Contribution Chart & Metrics
What I'm doing here is what's called Contribution. It's just showing the impact of that particular thing on issues with Reliability on my overall score so we can see there for USAA their score is being dragged backwards by around one point, one whole point out of 5 is about Reliability.
Even if they got to the level that PNC is, they could gain 0.7. That's a gap between this 1 and the 0.3, so they can gain 0.7 by this just getting that Reliability in order. Of course, they'd be aware of this, a Reliability issue would be feeding through in their system. They'd know what's going on.
But that what they don't understand, there's also things happening underneath that there's also Journeys not working and things like that for customers, a reasonably big problem for them to overcome.
We can see there though, sort of the second level that PNC could also improve. They need to pick themselves up as well because they're sort of at twice the level of impact than other... than Capital One and Discover Financial. Let's step forward again and just look at USAA and the history it's had across the past year. Again, these are issues and we know they've had that-their scores been dropping across time and the reason is dropping is because all of these issues are actually building across time as well. Again, that just shows as you... -as your score is going down these types of issues are the ones are going to be driving that score.
07:35 - USAA SURF Analysis Detail
What I will do though, is have a look -let's have a look at Q1 for USAA. What we're looking at here is some details so Q1, they've actually increased slightly, but what I'd like to do here is actually get to some detail as to how they compare to others.
Let's look at some Functionality issues. 41% of USAA customers are talking about some sort of Functionality issues. that's gone up 1.5 points in Q1. But let's have a look at some detail underneath that. If I look at one here called Poor App Payment Feature, that's actually slightly improved, it's gone from about 8% or 9% down to about 6% but how does that 6% of people with issues compare to others?
Let's just jump in and do a bit of Benchmarking here, and see how it compares to others. We saw that 6.1% -of the 18 Banks we have in this particular data set 6.1% is the largest by far, it's actually doubled TD and the average is about 1.7%, so about four times the level of average as USAA. Clearly some problems there, for them to overcome. And even if I just click through a few other things for example... Let's look at one here.
Poor App Money Transfer. How is that going? They've got 9.4% of customers. 1 in 10 are talking about some issue with Poor App Money Transfer and that, if we look at this list here, is well above the average as well. The average is 3.3% they're about three times that level so, clearly some issues there for USAA to overcome.
Let's not dwell too much on USAA. Let's move forward
and have a look at someone else, this one here...
09:07 - Discover Financial SURF Analysis Detail
I'll just look at my filters and show you, this is the latest month for Discover Financial and we saw this score had dropped and we can see that reflected here as well, we can see this score is 4.2 has gone down to 3.9, so at 0.3 drop. It's really substantial from the historical levels they've been at. First of all, we see Reliability is 14%, it's gone up by about 4%.
It was about 10% in February it's gone up to 14% in March. Simply for Functionality about 10% it's gone up to 12%. Clearly some issues going on for them as well. Let's have a look at a few other things sitting in here. Let's look at for example, what's in here.
This is interesting, this one here, Poor App Alerts and Notifications, it's gone up 0.6% which means it pretty much was non-existent before it's gone up from 0.1% to 0.7% Poor App Alerts and Notifications.
This is looking at just Discover Financial in March. Even though someone's given you a 5, if an issue with your Push Notifications... "Push notifications never work... The app is slow... Getting push notifications to work is a hassle". Clearly some Push Notification issues coming through for Discover Financial and need to improve there, so getting down to that detail is really important and lots of other things have got going on here as well, they could also improve on.
10:32 - Customer Journeys
One last piece here, is what I'm going to look at here is... looking at particular topics around Customer Journeys.
This is looking at -I'll put this in terms of the average score here, this is looking at the four focus areas here of USAA, Capital One, Discover Financial and PNC, and just seeing what's their score across these particular Journeys.
For example, I can see here, there's one here called Paying Bills via the App. The score for USAA is 1.8.
But what does that mean? What does 1.8 mean to me in terms of my overall scores? What I can do again we looked at this at the start, look at this thing called Contribution, which shows me how does that impact my score, how does going bad here impact my score? What I can see is it's -0.14. This particular thing, Paying Bills via the App which seems like a very straightforward thing is dragging the score back for USAA by 0.14 and clearly the others are doing well at this so they can show there's actually a way to improve here or a path forward.
And just getting down to some very quick detail before I close off here, so basic stuff: "Unable to pay my USAA credit card bill... All my pending bill payments just disappeared... I'm tempted to change providers... Paying my bills is so frustrating..." This frustration obviously leads to people leaving and if this is the channel they want to use, then clearly they'll have to move elsewhere if these types of problems are going on. Thank you, Glenn.
12:35 - Final words by Glenn
12:35 - Glenn: Some great insights here. Thank you, Tony. It is amazing how easy it is to drill down and uncover that granular data when you know where to look. So if you want access to this sort of information, if you want to give you a walk-through in regards to your bank, feel free to sing out and we're more than happy to spend a little bit of time giving you some insights in regards to how your bank is performing in these areas as well. Have a great day, folks.