February 2022 US Market Banking App Performance Review

As a bank, you are constantly striving for peak performance with your mobile app by providing relevant information and direction so you can prioritize actions and understand what needs to be improved. Currently, app feedback cannot be understood and analyzed with the necessary detail and agility.

Join us as we compare the performance of Banking Apps in the US Market each month. According to Engaged Customer Rankings Data, Who comes out on top? Who were the biggest movers (up and down) and which features and journeys have been identified as having issues and what needs to be prioritized by that bank to get back up the rankings. A short sharp look at this critical digital tool each month powered by some of the world’s most cutting edge technology making it easier to identify and prioritize actions to improve your mobile app.

Glenn: Oh, Welcome everybody to the Touchpoint group. Look at the US market for February of 2022. And, uh, we're looking specifically at banking it performance. And if you remember in January, we had a look at USA bank and Tony, it looks like they picked up a little bit from where they were. So what can you tell us about that?

00:25 Tony: Yeah, it definitely, it looks like it took three months to decline into November. And I'll show you on a chart in a moment, but it took three months to decline. And then it's been a three month turnaround into February and they're back to where they were at August so it's one of those things where you think, well, maybe they should have picked this up in September and not had five or six months of that sort of lull in what's going on so, it's interesting. And we should, we actually saw what was wrong in the previous, uh, the previous webinar.

00:50 Glenn: But the big news for February is the big drop for Wells Fargo. Yeah. I'm going to hand it straight over to you. Cause there's a lot to dig into to here uh, give us some insights in regards to what's happening with Wells Fargo and I won't mind

01:03 Tony: I'll just share my screen and let's have a look so I'm going to share it across to that and bring that up. So hopefully you can see that.That pops up.

01:14 Glenn: Yeah, we've got it. Loud and clear.

01:16 Tony: Brilliant. Okay. There's a lot of lines going on here and there's a few brands at the bottom, but I'll focus on one thing we can see as we're just talking about USA has had that dip, but it's sort of like a, been a six month sort of dip and back up against it's very, very slow in the recovery.

Um, but as, uh, as you mentioned, there's, uh, this dip for Wells Fargo actually does stand out so we can see there, there were sort of hovering around four but there's been a massive drop in February. So that's, that's really interesting. And we do know something about what happened in February because they had a major revamp of the app, uh, in terms of the UI, because they actually said that to us.

And I'll just, I'll just put you across to, this is, this is the Wells Fargo app store, and they've done this across Android andiOS, but in here, they're actually talking about what's new. And what we can see in here and I hope you can see that pop up coming up there is that across from the 17th of February, we can see that they've overhauled, there's a new experience. There's, the whole thing has been updated from the 17th. And this has been rolled out across, across various parts of February. But keep that in mind that February the 17th, because that's an important date as to what might've been going on. So what I'll do, I will just jump into. Um, what we can see here.

So this is now zooming in, just on a, just on Wells Fargo. And this is looking at the Google play versus app store. And we can see that with the app store, sort of, it was humming along at around four and a half. Now, again, one of the things about the, the scoring we're looking at here is these are about engaged customers.
So these customers are giving us score and a comment, and this is where we can, it's really sensitive to what's going on with your own, without that what you end up with. And I'll just slightly switch back to that. We ended up with this sort of information here you can see in the app store where the score for Wells Fargo is 4.9 of five - it looks all rosie - out of 6.7 million reviews. But look at the, even look at the comments that have been thrown at me as a, as a potential user of this.

03:20 Glenn: and the dates of those comments.

03:22 Tony: Yeah. Looked at looking at this as this is more than two years ago for this five star review. This is looking at. This is looking at pre COVID. This is looking at two and a half years ago for this, this one here.
03:33 Tony: And this other one here is looking at a year ago. So I'm not sure why they're being pushed like that. But again, this isn't showing me the recent things that are going on, and this average score out of five, that could be the average across the past three years for all we know. So it's really difficult for users to say what's going on, but as obviously, as, uh, as owners of that app, you need to understand and get that detail, um, yeah, early.

So one of the things I can show you here is that we saw this drop into February, but let's have a look at this, um, for across weeks to start with, let's have a look at what happened to you. So we can see this sort of, a bit of a cliff that's happened here. We can see that the average score was around four.It suddenly jumped off a cliff for both iOS and Android. And then we can see when that happened. It's sort of that week commencing the 14th of February and week commencing the 23rd. So there's a date in your mind. Remember the 17th of February, let's have a look and go two days. Let's look at this for days and we see exactly when this happened and you probably see what's going to happen here 17th of February or the bottom here.We can see. And basically that is when that drop happened. It's dramatic too. It's going from around four to around three and a half. So we know when that happened, it dropped away very fast. The thing is why did it happen? And it's happening across both Android and iOS as I mentioned. So let's have a look at something, something just to re-introduce again, what we use, um, for our high level analysis, uh, what we call a surf analysis or a surf pillars.

Cause these are the things you need to perform well on these four key areas to do well in the market. So the leaders are doing the best on these four key areas. So there's a surf analysis covers off security and authentication. So logging in and things like that. Usability, Reliability and Functionality. And one of the clear things we can see here is that usability there's problems across, across the board. But usability is the one where there's a major difference that we can see there. It's gone from 8.4% pain points around usability to 32% of the comments coming through from Wells Fargo. Again, we've picked the dates here from the first of the 16th and then the 17th to the 28th. So . What's turned things around between those, those two date periods.

So 32% of comments coming through from the 17th to the 28th, around that usability and on the right, we get examples of usability type things that are happening so difficult to navigate. It doesn't work, the update ruined it. Um, we could see it's, it's impossible to navigate. Um, but design's a disaster. Um, now again, often you get this, these types of things happening with changes that are sort of, you know, away from the normal design of things, but people have having a real problem getting to, to what they're trying to do.

And here's a nice example, not nearly as user friendly, too many clicks needed to get info that was previously available without any clicks. So, there's an extension of what people need to do. And again, a lot people actually can't even locate what they're supposed to be doing. So clearly there's a problem there. Um, and this should be addressed fast. I don't think this is the normal sort of, can we get used to something that might be a bit different? This looks like something they need to fix now.

06:45 Glenn: Potentially a roll back

06:47 Tony: Well even well, potentially, because this is really, really, it's a massive drop in both the scores. And often what you see when there's an update is you might see some sort of login issues because has been a thing that obviously we can see a bit of that going on, but it's fairly minimal compared to those usability issues.

So maybe have to have a review of what's going on, potentially a roll back, but that's obviously massive, but a roll back at least allows you to then go and, and, and assess what's going on. Uh, one of the things we also should look at is, is, okay. Let's have a look at the details. Your usability is a fairly broad.

Let's have a look underneath that. So what we have here is, uh, is, uh, this surf analysis you saw it before, so it doesn't make this the order of, um, so it looks like, you know, we've got surfaced, security, usability, et cetera. What I can see here is usability is, is mentioned by, and this is looking at comparing January to February. So broadly what's happened between those two months. What I can see here is just in general, poor app usability. It's about 11% in February, but it's gone up 6.5 points from, from January. So you're looking at around, you know, it's it's it's it's it's it was about 4% previously and it jumped up to about 11 and the same with say, poor user interface.

It was, uh, it was in the, in below one point, it was actually about 0.8 or something. It's jumped up to 4.1. So these things are actually increasing across the board. So let's have a look at these things on the right. I've got, let's have a look at poor user interface as an example. And on the right here, it's bringing it up for me.

Let's look at the ones who are having a really hard time with this. So the ones and twos to sort of really get down to that detail. And what I can do here is I can see. Um, again, it's hard if it's bringing out some of those things we saw previously previously difficult to navigate the designs. Awful. I want to change back.

I don't like how that looks or how it functions. Um, you're hard to navigate and confusing. So there's clearly problems with people when they're accessing this app. Um, what we can do though, is I can have a look at this from a competitive perspective. So briefly, let's have a look at the poor user interface. Where does Wells Fargo fit in the market? So it's about 4%. Uh, Huntington's having sort of a few more issues there, but 4% as compared to others in the top level are actually about 0.3, about where Wells Fargo was previously. Um, if I go to the more broad topic about that, difficult to use. Wells Fargo is down there at about 11%, whereas they used to be sort of playing around at the top here at around 3%. So clearly they've actually disconnected from the market in terms of expectations that usability from customers.

09:29 Glenn: Big news, big news. And that's really all we've got time for, to talk about today, but when it comes down to it. Yeah. Using these tools to be able to understand the impact of these changes, and it's going to be helping these businesses turn things around faster. So if anybody's interested in finding out more around how do we actually access this sort of data? Give us a shout. Thanks team.

If you would like a personalized look at your own bank's performance and insight we can give you, feel free to contact Touchpoint Group today and we can organize a specific insights session just for your business.