July 2023 US Banking App Rankings and Insights Session

July 2023 US Banking App Insights Session Executive Summary: “Addressing the Nuances in Customer Satisfaction”

In this month's insights session, hosted by Touchpoint Group, Glenn Marvin and Tony Patrick dissected the current state of banking apps, specifically analyzing data for July 2023 in the U.S. market. Their session offers invaluable insight into the multifaceted nature of customer satisfaction, emphasizing the importance of monitoring small, incremental changes that can snowball into significant impacts on user experience.

The banking sector, in its essence, is an ever-evolving ecosystem, primarily driven by customer preferences. Today's digitally empowered customers have elevated expectations, and even the minutest deviations in app performance or feature availability can trigger shifts in satisfaction levels. Tony's in-depth analysis of U.S. banks, including prominent players like Capital One, US Bank, and USAA, underpins this very notion.

A central theme echoed throughout the session was the significance of the 'Engaged Customer Score.' Distinct from standard ratings, this metric is derived from customers who not only rate the app but also provide a comment on the Apple App Store or Google Play. This dual approach ensures a more holistic understanding of user sentiment, capturing both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of feedback.

US Bank's impressive performance serves as a testament to its consistent user experience, even though subtle signs of a decline are emerging. At the other end of the spectrum, Capital One's trajectory reveals a more pronounced dip in user satisfaction. Tony's insights here are particularly compelling: by leveraging the Engaged Customer Score, the team could ascertain specific areas of concern for Capital One users, such as reliability and stability issues. Furthermore, a previously overlooked feature—checking account balances—emerged as a significant pain point.

The case of Capital One accentuates the importance of adopting a granular approach when assessing app performance. Often, broader metrics may overlook subtle yet escalating user concerns. By contrast, dissecting individual features and their respective impacts on overall satisfaction provides a clearer picture of potential red flags.

Another crucial dimension explored was the process of translating physical banking activities into digital ones, with the 'check deposit' feature as a case in point. This seemingly straightforward function has become a challenging endeavor for several banks, with some excelling while others falter. Tony's comparative analysis between US Bank and USAA underscored this disparity. While US Bank garnered positive feedback for its seamless check deposit experience, USAA grappled with user complaints about transaction processing errors and device location issues.

Such disparities in feature implementation, as Tony emphasized, have tangible consequences. Using a metric that quantifies the impact of individual features on the overall app score, he illustrated how a single poorly executed feature could substantially drag down a bank's rating. US Bank's effective check deposit functionality boosted its score, while USAA's shortcomings in this domain reduced its overall rating.

Concluding the session, Glenn Marvin highlights a broader implication of these insights. App scores aren't just mere numbers; they encapsulate individual user experiences. In a volatile banking landscape characterized by fluctuating credit ratings and wavering customer trust, these scores represent trust indices. As such, even minor enhancements or setbacks in app features can significantly impact user trust.

For banking institutions aiming to solidify their foothold in the digital space, the key takeaway from this session is clear: vigilance and proactiveness are paramount. By continually monitoring, analyzing, and refining app features, banks can not only enhance user satisfaction but also fortify trust, laying the groundwork for sustained growth and loyalty.

Banks and financial institutions aiming for excellence in their digital offerings are urged to delve deeper into such insights, as they pave the way for superior user experiences and, by extension, long-lasting customer relationships.

Video Transcript:

2:06 Banking App Ranking Changes

2:25 Capital One Gradual Decline Charting

4:55 Deeper Dive Into Cheque Deposit Best Practice US Bank Vs USAA

Hi everybody, and welcome to another Touchpoint group banking app insight session. We're looking at July 2023 for the US market and in this session we're going to look at a couple of different things. Firstly, how you should be tracking the small incremental changes that can help you arrest the decline and customer satisfaction before it gets too much of a negative impact.

And then we're going to do a little bit more of a features look at the cheque deposit feature and some of the best practise that's out there versus some of the not so best practise and what you can do to close the gap in those areas. Tony Patrick, as ever, will be leading the charge on this and I'll pass it over to you, Tony, to walk us through it.

Brilliant. Thank you, Glenn. Yeah. So today, looking at US banks, and you can see here, there's a few of those in this particular view, just by the way, if your bank isn't here, we don't change this too often, this particular view, but if your bank isn't here, just reach out to us and we can do a personalised session to go through yours.

But today we're looking at Capital One actually, and I'll show you why. So let's just jump in and have a look at a bit of detail. So just looking at Tier One banks at the moment. So one of the things we can see is US Bank is actually doing pretty well at the top for them.

They're actuallyhad a couple of months of decline, but it's very subtle at this point. And one of the things we can also see is Truist growth is continuing, although they had a couple of dips across the year. One of the things that is interesting here is that Capital One. Although it's a subtle movement down across time and some measures, you might not be able to see this, but the way we work with this data, of course, is we're looking at what we call the Engaged Customer score. So those customers giving both a rating and also a comment on the App Store or Android Store.

So what we get then is movements that are happening here. We know exactly why they're happening, why something's gone up, why something's gone down, and there are two parts to this. One is we can see at the end of this period for Capital One, there's been a dip. So that's the dip.

It's the lowest there have been this year. But of course, you can see the trend across the year is also declining from around 4.4 and sitting around just above 4.0 in this most recent month. So let's move and have a quick look before we jump into and have a look at that in the detail.

Let's have a look at what's happening with the rest of the market.

So USAA is still down here, but they are improving slightly, but it's not fast enough from our perspective. They did have the major dip in October and they need to pick that up. Otherwise it's going to be a full year before things recover. Another interesting thing is a question we get is, for example, we have the likes of, say, Citibank and others sitting at the and even bank of America.

They're floating around 4.2 to 4.5, you know? They're not going to move down ever, are they? Well, yes, they are. Now here's an example of something that's happened recently. Discover Financial was one of our top level banks, has been sitting there for a long time at sort of up, not only bumping up against four and a half, but in February they dropped away and they have not recovered since.

July is their first slight turnaround. But again, if you're not watching what's going on here, you could actually drop away like that and even the likes of Citibank and bank of America can also be susceptible to that. So just good to watch out for those things. So let me just move forward into having a look at some other banks here.

So one of interest for a while has been Fifth Third. They are picking some things back up, but of course they need to improve a bit further from where they are. But they are picking things up. You can see from April, which is great. TD is struggling from the drop they had in October.

So again, we're going to watch that next month as well to see where that moves to. So what I will do, I will have a look at just looking here, this is just an exaggerated, well, just a view of Capital One on its own. And we can see it was bumping up sort of around 4.4 and now it's hitting around four point, just below 4.1.

So we need to actually see what's happened, but also what's happened across time here. So first of all, I'll have a look at what's happened recently. So first of all, I've just gone in here and looked at this week by week, so from the start of May until the end of July.

And what we can see here is the drop that happened in July has basically come from the middle of July. It's dropped away from that point. So something's happened in the middle of July and it's moved down a level. So what we can do then is just have a look at what's happened in here.

I'll just start out at reliability and stability, for example. But what I can see at the top here, this is the actual score we saw before. So that movement from 4.2 to 4.1 for Capital One. And what I can see at the bottom here, because these are pain points, these are all pain points, we want these scores to go down, we want these frequencies to go down as far as we can.

And I can see that reliability and stability has gone up by 0.4. So it's fairly flat in the scheme of things. Others have actually improved. So design UI has gone down, which is great, and authentication has gone down. But the one thing that's gone up is features and functionality.

So previously it was around three and a half and it's gone up 1.3 points. So again, this is what we're talking about is subtle movement, but I can actually see what's going on in here. I can see among features and functionality.

So in general, there's a pickup in poor moving money feature, which is just fairly broad. But if I go down below that here was something that was basically nonexistent previously, but now is popping up a basic thing like checking your account balance. So what I can see here is there's people can't see their current balance after a payment and there's no running balance and it's becoming an issue for customers here.

Even this person here has said it won't show me my balances even when configured to do so. So clearly an emerging issue for customers. So they need to keep an eye out for that. Definitely

The next thing is looking at why that long term trend has happened. So looking at these pain point areas, again, what I can see is reliability instability here has been going up, up and up.

So that's the major driver of what's going on here. Although we can see features and functionality, that little dip at the end we saw and we know why that's happened because of the issue with people being able to see their current balance in there as well.

Let's have a quick closer look at reliability and stability. So what's underneath that? What's actually driving that number going up?

If I include broad technical issues, this is often when people talk about they've had problems without specific what they are, we can see that's increasing. So that's interesting. If I take that away, what we can see broadly here is app bugs, crashes and freezes that's going up in frequency.

We want to squash that down as far as we can. And slow app is also increasing across there as well. So clearly this is something that's fairly subtle in the movement that's going on across the whole year. But Capital One need to watch out for this because it's really important that they attack this before it becomes a major issue.

So that is Capital One. What I'd like to have a look at now, just switching across to something different here, I'd like to have a look at, not particularly for Capital One, but across a few different brands here is how they're performing on various journeys or particular features in the app here.

Now, the one I want to focus on today is also it's a bit of a mind switch as well because we're looking here at the Engaged Customer Score. So when someone talks about one of these features, what's the associated score with that? Are they happy or unhappy in that conversation? And what I can see here for cheque deposit.

Now, cheque deposit is one of those things which you can you can do well, but also it's a struggle for a lot of brands to get right, because we're turning something that's like a cheque from the physical world into the digital world, and it becomes a problem to do that.

So first of all, I want to have a look at US bank which is scoring really well. This is looking at just this year, just seeing how they've done so far. Let's just select them and see what they're actually up to.

So the first thing we'll look at is the comments. Now in general, this is a score from one to five. And in general we can see this is green. There's a green tinge across the whole lot of it only a couple of things, a couple of problems here where it doesn't want to scan cheques but in general you can see things is people loving depositing cheques are quick and easy.

I love it. It's a great experience for customers. You can see also I'll do a quick look at this view here which is looking at basically what's the story coming out of this data in terms of broadly, what's the broad view of what's going on, like a helicopter view, and you can see here the comments coming through in this area here are looking at things like good act cheque deposit feature.

It's a great feature, I can deposit cash, I can take a photo of the cheque, a couple of little red areas.

So some areas still for improvement. But still you get the idea that this is a very positive experience for customers. US, let's switch across to somewhere else. This one is looking at USAA and let's jump into that to see what the comparative view looks like.

So the story we have now is basically you can see very red. So it's dragging the score backwards. So poor app, cheque deposit feature, poor app cheque feature. For example, there's things going on like transaction processing problems, for example. So lots of issues happening in there for those customers.

But what I would like to do is also look at examples of these comments. So you remember when we're looking at US Bank, we saw a whole lot of green sitting in there as well. So what I can see now though is basically we've got a lot of red.

So that's our problem here is we've got issues with cheque deposit. There's errors. It's impossible because the app is unable to see my device location. So errors across the board. And again, this just shows what a good experience is like and what a bad experience is like. So that's all interesting.

So there's obviously some good and bad experiences coming from different app types. Let's have a look though. What is the impact on all this?

We're looking at here is just showing us how does it impact my score. So if I have a good experience, which we saw from US bank, I'm actually contributing in a positive way to my score. Now, just by the way, this is just for one particular feature in your app, how it's impacting your score.

So apply this across all of your features and you see you can actually have a really bad experience if you don't do it well across all your features. I can see here that US Bank is actually getting more a higher score because of this by zero six, whereas the likes of USAA, their score is being dragged down by nearly 0.1 out of five just because of this feature.

So again, that just shows us the impact of these features across the board and being able to pick up that detail so you can improve every single feature to get to that higher level and scoring and what customers expect these days from a banking app. So. Thank you, Glenn.

Great points there, Tony. And I think another mindset that you can use when looking at these is it's not just the score. That score is a reflection of personal experience. And so when you look at that graphic there where you see it's having such a massive impact dragging it down.

It is having a negative impact on the user experience of the app. And in today's climate where credit ratings are up and. There's risk around there and people's confidence is being tested when it comes to the whole banking sector. All of these little things add up massively in regards to building that trust. So if you want to improve the trust, improve the experience, and have a bigger impact on the experience of your customers, you're more than welcome.

Reach out, have a chat with us and we can have a deeper dive into your banking app and go from there. Thanks again, Tony.