April 2022 UK Legacy Banks App Performance Snapshot

Executive Summary

Lloyds Bank had been the market leader throughout 2021 with an Engaged Customer Score (ECS) consistently sitting around 4.3  but took a dip in early 2022 and dropped to 4. They have however recently made that ground back up and finished April back up with a 4.3 ECS rating.

Barclays have had a good run of form in Feb & March 2022 and been ahead through to April. However a gradual drop in engaged customer score sees Lloyds back on top and Nationwide sneak into second spot with the great work they have been putting into the app experience over the past few months.

Nationwide Insights:

The major improvement in Engaged Customer Score performance has come from iOS users with Core Customer Journeys.

Great feedback from customers on how seamless and efficient the app update processes have been.  Once again we see how focusing on getting simple things right consistently can make a dramatic impact on customer experience.

Engaged Customer Score Rankings For April 2022

1. Lloyds

2. Nationwide

3. Barclays

4. Santander

5. Natwest

Full Video Transcript:

00:00 Glenn: Hi everybody and welcome to another Touchpoint Group industry snapshot, looking at the Banking App Performance in the UK market for April of 2022. With me, I've got Nick Young. Who's our lead consultant out of the UK and the standout performer Nick, for April has really been Nationwide, hasn't it? In fact, probably the stand out story over the last six months.

00:30 Nick: I think that's right, Glenn. I mean, before we get into Nationwide, let's just, just look at the, you know, the UK market, I'm calling them Legacy Banks to distinguish them from Challenger Banks. These lines represent their average monthly, engaged customer rating from app store data. You can see you know, complicated picture. But reading from the top, the gray line, is Lloyds generally speaking, that is a bit of a dip in March, but they've been more or less the leader, throughout this period.

But the great challenger for them has been Barclays, which is the, orange line, which has actually been ahead, for most of the past few months. But the interesting one to us is the brown line, which has come from nowhere, in November with an average app rating of 3.5.

This is Nationwide, of course. And is now right up there in the mix, you know, you can see it's cheek by jowl with Lloyds and even above, Barclays by the end of April, I would stress, this is all, you know, incredibly recent data that we've just download it. So you are looking at the very most recent picture, which um undoubtedly has in April Nationwide and Lloyd's as more or less joint number one.

01:50 Glenn: Mm. All right. So let's dig into Nationwide shall we, see what they'd be doing.

01:54 Nick: Good. Yeah. It's interesting story. So let's see how they highly managed to get there. I mean, one of the obvious things to do is just to look at the mix between iOS and Android. Clearly, you know, Nationwide's ratings improve and customer experience improvement has been very much biased towards, iOS. So they moved from two point tags all the way up to nearly four.

Just actually, you know, sort of, at least a hundred basis points growth through iOS, whereas Google hasn't done anything like that. And then, I mean, the other way of kind of trying to disinter this to make sense of it is to look at these, for a, what we call, um, customer experience, hierarchy levels. So you've got like level one of the fundamental attributes, you know, things like Reliability and Security and Usability.

Then we've got core customer journeys, which are, you know, the tasks of the app is really, you know, has to solve for the customer in order to be viable. So these are things like, you know, Balance Checking, Mobile App Updates, Authentication getting into the app and so on. Then we've got, you know, the things that, you know, the app is really there to support which are, all the incremental features around. Managing your money in a current account.

So transferring funds, getting statements, paying people, paying bills and so on and so forth. And lastly, I guess what, you know, at the end of the day really matters to the bank, which is, this concept of Customer Loves that's the emotional affinity customers, helpful of the brand. This is interesting through looking at Nationwide and this shows you effectively where they've moved the needle most in this past six months. They've moved it a bit in Foundational Attributes.

They’ve actually gone slightly backwards in Incremental Banking Features. They've been more or less steady in customer love. But they're very high in customer love. As most of these brands are solid high street banks. The one where they've really kind of moved the needle is in, core customer journey. So let's go and drill down there a little bit more.

So these are, the four main dimensions to customer journeys. Mobile App Update is the one where they seem to have done the most. Again, they've slightly moved down, but this isn't really impactful in terms of Authentication, App Check, Account Balance, Feature, and Deposit Checks. They actually have deposit check. So that's they don't have that functionality. So this is fairly neutral. What the impact means is, this is the contribution that that particular attribute has made to the change in the overall score. So if you remember, we said that improved their overall score by about 90 points overall and a hundred points in iOS. So Mobile App Update is contributed, around a fifth of that pretty significant.

And I guess you're asking, you know, what is mobile app update or what is it that customers are saying, you know, cause he's a bit of a, kind of generic term. So let's look at that. Now we're, now we can see what customers are actually saying about it. And you can see what matters to them is that the app is up to date, that when they do get an update, there's some benefit like as the second comment says, it now shows, you know, where the transactions are originating, you know, where the money is, originating its transactions I think it means.

And then, you know, the update experience is fairly painless, and we've seen examples of apps where the update is a real pain and customers have to log in, or it ever again or, you know, even completely uninstalling and reinstall. But really the customers are just saying, look, you've got a great new update process, and the latest update seems to represent ah, you know, a kind of material improvement on the previous versions.
So kudos to Nationwide. you know, they've really, I think, focused on. One particular aspect, the customer journey aspect of the customer experience or mobile app updates in particular, and just doing something really quite simple, but very well as has fueled this, you know, rather impressive growth over the past six months.

06:02 Glenn: Yeah, that's fantastic. And maybe if we can go back to this first screen again showing all of all of those legacy banks because it's really interesting to show how doing something simple well can have such an impact on that customer experience. And this if we've seen anything across the UK and the US over the last few months, it is not managing that update or a refreshed process well, can have a dramatic negative impact on that experience as well. So it's an area fraught with risk and they seem to have handled it incredibly well.

06:44 Nick: Absolutely

06:46 Glenn: Brilliant. Well, that is a good little snapshot at that Legacy Sector of the UK Market for April, 2022. We do do these every single month so, if you want to keep up to date and you want to get more of these, jump through to a site where you can subscribe to get first, first dibs on each of these as we release them. And we'll look forward to catching up with you next month. Thanks Nick.
 

07:13 Nick: Thanks Glenn.