Oct 2023 US Banking App Rankings and Insights Session

October 23 US Banking App Rankings and Insights Executive Summary:

The October 2023 Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session focused on analyzing the performance of various US banks, with a particular emphasis on Truist Bank and TD Bank. The session highlighted key trends, improvements, and challenges in the banking app sector.

1.  Market Overview:

The overall market showed stability, with banks like US Bank maintaining consistent performance. However, the session delved deeper into two banks, Truist and TD, due to significant developments.

2.  Truist Bank Analysis:

   - Truist Bank had experienced a noticeable drop in customer ratings, primarily attributed to their latest app release.

   - The Engaged Customer Score, which includes customer ratings and comments, dropped from 4.5 to 3.9. This reflected issues related to reliability, stability, bugs, crashes, slow app performance, and a poor update.

   - Customer feedback pinpointed frequent app updates causing glitches and accessibility problems, leading to app freezes and crashes.

   - These issues emerged prominently in the week starting October 16th, coinciding with the release of version 2.63, which had a significantly lower average score of 3.0.

3.  TD Bank Analysis:

   - TD Bank had previously faced a drop in customer satisfaction, mainly due to bugs and crashes. However, this had seemingly improved in October.

   - Reliability and stability issues accounted for a significant portion of customer complaints in September, constituting 65% of the feedback.

   - October witnessed improvements in reliability, with the percentage of related feedback dropping to 30%. However, a new issue emerged: design and UI problems.

   - The latest app release led to a rise in design and UI complaints, with customers finding the new layout less intuitive, requiring more clicks to perform tasks.

4.  Recommendations:

   - Truist Bank should address the issues stemming from their latest app release promptly. They need to focus on improving reliability and stability to regain customer trust.

   - TD Bank should continue to monitor the design and UI concerns raised by customers. This may require iterative improvements to align the app with user preferences.

   - Both banks should prioritize customer feedback and engage in regular app testing to ensure a seamless and user-friendly experience.

In conclusion, the October 2023 Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session highlighted the importance of digging deeper into banking app performance. Superficial improvements may mask underlying issues that affect customer satisfaction. Truist Bank and TD Bank serve as examples of the need for ongoing monitoring and responsiveness to customer feedback to maintain and enhance their app experiences. These insights underscore the critical role of customer-centric app development and continuous improvement in the competitive banking industry.

Video Transcript: October 2023 US Banking App Insights Session

00:05 - Glenn Marvin: Everybody and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insights session. We're looking at the US bank categories for October 2023, and Tony Patrick joins me. 

And we are looking at a couple of banks in detail this month. We've got Truist Bank who have had a drop in their ratings, and that's coming down to their latest release, the latest app release, and TD Bank. Well, there's some good improvements, but there's something lurking under the surface that may not get picked up if all you're doing is focusing on the overall lift in performance. Tony, I'm going to hand it over to you and you can guide us through what you're seeing in the data.

00:51 - Tony Patrick: Great, thank you, Glenn. So today looking at a lot of these banks here in just an overview of their score to start with. But of course, we'll focus on the banks that Glenn mentioned. So, let's just jump straight in, give us some context about what's going on in the market. 

Looking at here, what we can see is. One of the things I can see here is that the likes of US Bank are pretty steady and going across the board as they normally do. But one of the things we're going to look at today is Truist, and they've had a nice increase over the past year or so, but that drop is particularly drastic compared to things over the past six months. So we'll look at that and see what's going on. 

Let's move forward into looking at these banks here. So one of the things we can see going on here is what I might do, actually, is just move USAA because they've dropped down and they moved the scale a bit.

They haven't improved since that drop in August. But let's move them away for the moment. We can see here are some nice improvements and the likes of Bank of American Citibank sort of doing strongly at the top there as well.

Well, there's one thing I want to look at today as well, is looking at this movement in particular here. So TD bank has gone down in September and they've come back in October. And you might think, well, they've just fixed what's happened in September and that's turned around, but we'll look underneath that and find out why.

But before we jump into that, one of the things we've been following for a while is Fifth Third, and their great improvement from that down right at the bottom there in March, they've had a gradual improvement month on month across time. So that's great. One of the things to be aware of, though, is this particular group here doesn't score as well as the other two groups we saw previously.

So if we look at 3.5 as our score just here, if Fifth Third was amongst those other groups, they would be the lowest in each of those groups.

We have to be careful about what we're comparing against, but they are doing well. So Kudos to them.

Next thing I'd like to have a look at is these two. So these are the two we had a look at previously. So looking at Truist and also TD, so what has happened with, with these two? 

So first of all, I'll have a look at Truist. There's been a drop. What's happened? 

So those familiar with what we're doing with this is we can actually see why that drop has occurred. So if I step through into this view here, just focus on the left for now. So we can see there, that's the score reflected up there. So 4.5 down to 3.9.

Now, one of the things about that score, which is across all the scores we saw previously, it's what we call the Engaged Customer Score. So that's customers who've given us both a score and a comment. And the powerful thing behind that is we can see even subtle movements as to things are happening, and also every movement, we know why it's happened, because there's a comment attached to everything that's going on.

The great thing about this, we can see why that's happened. Now, this is a fairly common thing. We suddenly get Reliability and Stability issues turning up. So we can see there that in October, that's 17.9%. That's gone up 9.7 points. So it was about 8% in the previous month, it's gone up to 18%.

And we can see just to the right of that, a bit of detail, broad Technical Issues, some Bugs and Crashes, a Slow App as well, and a Poor Update has also been mentioned. 

So what we've also done is as part of this, I can just select on the right, that topic and it quickly summarises that for me with an AI approach.

And what I can see is very quickly here is the users have reported frequent updates that often lead to glitches and inaccessibility. Updates have caused the app to freeze and crash, and the most recent update reportedly broke the app on one user's phone. So a lot of these things are causing issues with the new update has been mentioned throughout here, things like slow load times, problems with mobile deposits.

So it's actually influencing certain parts of the app. And even down the bottom here, there's things like transaction dates, setting up a new payee. And the bill paying portion has also caused issues down around there as well. So it's across the board, there's sort of issues happening for that app.

But let's have a look at when that happened. 

So what we can see here is this is that same score we saw previously. Looking at it by week, we can see clearly here it's week commencing the 16th of October. That that's happened. So clearly there was a problem then and it seems to have turned around to some extent.

But let's have a look, though, at what's happened from an app release perspective. Now, there's a lot happening on this chart here, but I'll just describe this to you briefly. Across the top, we've got this by week, and this is just Truist. So by week this is what's happening.

And then down the side here, we've got app versions from at the bottom there we've got 2.4 up to 2.5, and then right at the top there is that most recent release at 2.6.3. And we can see there the average score for that release is 3.0, which is a lot lower than the previous versions there.

And that release, as you can see, and as you'd expect, that hit week commencing 16th og October. So that particular release has caused those bugs and crashes which are causing issues across the board, including things like making payments, as we saw before. So Truist will need to adapt and learn from that, because they need to improve from this particular piece here, which is causing a problem for customers.

So I won't go too deeply into that, but it just gives us a feel of what's happening.

The next one, though, is interesting. So this is looking at the score for TD. So we see there the score was sort of hovering around 3 and we saw that drop in September. Now we know why that happened. I won't go into detail around that. There were bugs and crashes and actually that seemed to have been fixed. So if you look at that with scores gone up, so therefore, well, maybe that has been fixed and we're all in our way, we're all happy. Well, yeah, to some extent. Let's have a look.

Now, what this view is here is looking at pain points. These are all problems. And we see across the bottom there, we've got various areas of problems as well. And these are the most important things that impact your Customer Score. So Authentication, logging in, Reliability, Stability, Features and Functionality and Design and UI.

If you look at trends of these weekly for TD, we can see one clear thing here. One clear thing is that Reliability and Stability was a problem in September. That plateau we see in the middle, at the top there is because of that. That's what's caused that score to drop in September.

And what we can see in there is 65% of the feedback was around Reliability issues. Clearly a big problem for customers. Now, we can see that's improved so clearly into October. The last four points there into October, clearly there's been some improvement. It's not perfected, it's not down to low levels, but it's still improved, which is great.

However, what's happened is there's something else going on. So while that's going on, people are having a problem with Design and UI. Now, generally that only means one thing. It means essentially there's been some app release with some changes in the app about the user interface. And this is what's bringing this up.

So let's have a look at what customers actually think about what's going on.

So let's look. Focus on the left here. We can see that dip we saw, which was for last month, and that increase into October. And we know. That's because of number one there's been some Reliability improvements. So how big are those improvements? Well, they've halved. We see here in October, 30% of the feedback is about Reliability problems.

It was about 29% higher so it was towards 60-50+. In terms of the feedback was around that issue. That's a massive improvement. So that version has actually done lot there. But we can see also that design and UI has actually jumped up. It was about 8%. It's jumped up to about 14%.

So that's not alarming at this stage. But of course you want to be tracking that to understand is that getting worse. Are customers continuing to have a poor experience?

We can easily then see on the right a quick summary of what's happened there. So this is just looking at all those comments connected to that Design in UI issue and what's actually gone a really, this third one here is a really good summary of what's actually happened in here.

So the recent update to the app is a common point of complaint. Users find the new layout hard to use and less intuitive than the previous version. They also report having to click multiple times to perform simple tasks. So things like Customer Journeys have been interrupted for some customers.

But of course, if TD has done their homework, they've actually made this into a better experience and generally, over maybe two to three months, they should see this sort of stuff go away as those customers get used to what's going on.

One to keep an eye on, definitely. What I will have a look at though, is that App Release Cycle, because this is a nice one to watch all the time. We've found this is a really useful way to see what's happened. Now, again, that release of that 8.25 is actually connected to that around that 16th of September, just as that launch comes in.

And what we can also see if we go to the next piece, is see when that launch happened and what happened to the score. So we see on the left here, we've got the app versions in sequence. 8.24. The average score for 8.24 was 1.8. So that was the one causing those major issues with reliability.

8.25 seems to have settled that down a lot. So that's really, that's a really positive thing for TD. They've done that, but of course, we're getting that underlying issue with the Design and UI issues popping up. So TD need to keep an eye on that and continue to improve on what they're doing with their Reliability issues.

So a bit of work to do, but some things to watch for TD next time around.

10:27 - Glenn: So yet again, the devil is in the detail, and what you see on the surface isn't necessarily a true reflection of what's going on underneath. So thanks for that, Tony. And if you want to talk to us about doing a deep dive into your banking app, feel free to sing out.

And we're more than happy to set something up with one of the team. Thanks all, and we'll see you next month.