April 2022 US Tier 1 Banks App Performance Snapshot

Executive Summary

US Bank continues to perform strongly with consistent Engaged Customer Score Ratings (ECS) above 4.5 opening a slight gap on the Capital One banking app that has taken a dip in performance in the last 3 months.

PNC engaged customer score rankings took a hit in Feb and March but have come back with updates leading to a strong turnaround in April with positive sentinment from customers returning to an overall rating of 3.8 ECS.

Deeper Dive Into The Truist Banking App Performance

When we segment user ratings by operating system we see consistent performance in Engaged Customer Scores between Android and iOS which shows good consistent management of updates. We often find that one operating system out performs the other in thne ratings reflecting the focus of development and understanding of UX on each platform.

Looking at user pain points in our SURF analysis (3min 56sec) we can see that the painpoints customers are identifying have dramatically reduced since August 2021 and those reductions have been relatevely consistent across time. This reflects the consistent approach to working on improvements.

Negative sentiment relating to security and auhentication issuea that were highly prevalent in August 2021 have reduced by 63%

Negative sentiment relating to the user interface and reliability have also halved.

One core feature continuing to drive negative sentiment and holding the ECS ratings back in April from  the 1.6.0 update is Zelle payment issues.

Engaged Customer Score Rankings For April 2022

1. US Bank

2. Capital One

3. PNC

4. Truist

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Full Video Transcript

00:00 Glenn: Hello everybody, Glenn Marvin here and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session. This particular segment we're looking at is the US Tier One Banks for April of 2022. And we’re going to have a little bit of a dive into Truist aren’t we, Tony Patrick. Perennial under-performers we've called them before, but they're making some good progress.

00:25 Tony: Yeah, definitely. So, what we can see here is that what we're covering today is US Tier One Banks so, US Bank, Capital One, we’ve got PNC, and Truist. And so we'll cover off those today. And if you'd like to look at the other banks, there are even other ones we have outside this just, obviously look at some other sessions we've done on those other areas.

So what I can have a look at now is just, first of all, like we always like to do is have a look at the trends. Now those of you who have watched a few of these will be aware of what this number actually is and what it means. So, what we're looking at here is our Engaged Customer Score. 

So, what it is, is basically anyone who's given a score and a comment in the ratings in iOS and Android stores. What that allows us to do, these people are actually engaged. They're giving us real feedback and real understanding of what's going on and what we find with that number, is it’s sensitive to real things happening with your app. 

So if you see a movement here something has definitely happened whereas other numbers you might see, like even in the app stores and Android stores, they're fairly flat across time, they remain the same. You might sit at 4.2 and it remains at 4.2 year after year, and you can't see any change. This is why this is important. You can see the real movements. 

Now, a few things we can see here. Obviously we can see in red, at the bottom here, which we'll cover off, which is, Truist, which had a sort of a low point in August, that's obviously picked up, but a few others like PNC, which we've spoken about previously had a drop into March, and that looked like that could have continued, but it's been a really sharp turnaround.

So, I think there has been an app update there, that’s actually fixed a few things with that app. So let's have a look though at today's focus, which is Truist.

So, you can see there from August, we can see there's been a gradual increase, like a really solid increase in January, but that sort of dropped off slightly in February, but that's continuing to improve. 

So, a sort of a stuttered improvement, but it's clearly going up and it's hit the highest, it's only hit this point in January and in May last year. So another round of this, same solid improvements, we're going to hit the highest levels that Truist has seen over the past year. So let's step into this and have a look at what's happening here.

Now, one of the things we can have a look at is iOS versus Android. This is just Truist and how they’ve moved across time. One of the things you'll notice though is, both of these are showing the same trend. They're both showing that same lump in January, the improvement, and this improvement into March and April.

So they're sort of running in step with each other, which is really important because if you fix one, don't fix the other one, the experience isn't the same for any particular customer.

One of the great things about this is actually often you'll see that one of these underperforms and often it's iOS that underperforms compared to Android, but here it's pretty much they're performing at the same level, although low as we talked about, but they are being sort of lifted at the same time, which is very important.

So let's move forward and understand what's going on with this, with this particular improvement into April.

The first thing we're going to have a look at is a comparison of this SURF model, the SURF pillars. Now those, again, for those familiar with this will understand it. What I can take you through here is having a look at what this actually means.

The four key areas are: Security and Authentication: logging in. User Interface: the UX and UI experience. Reliability: Is it crashing, or what else is going on with the App? And, Features: are the features performing at the level that's expected of them. Now, of course, what we're looking at here are pain points. Lower is better, and that's an important thing to understand. 

We saw from the original chart that Truist is underperforming here, and we can see here again, in this SURF model, we can see the same thing happened. Now, one of the things we often talk about is what is good. The total of the SURF metrics, what looks good?

We often say that under 20 is good, but if you get below 15, you're in really nice territory. One of the things for US Bank, they're sitting consistently below 10% across these. So, it shows us what is possible across these measures.

You get your security right, you get your reliability right, and you can really perform really well. Then the customers can take advantage of the actual features of your product rather than trying to sort of stumble through and get things right in the first place.

So, let's have a brief look at how Truist has trended on the SURF metric across time.

So, this going down is good because this is a pain point. We're reducing pain points across time. Now, one of the things I can see if I isolate a few of these things. Let's isolate security and logging in. I can see that that has been a really big fix across time. In August last year at the low point in the score, it was around 15%.

So, 15% of people giving commentary here, talking about problems, logging in, and if you can't log in, then the apps are useless essentially for the customer. So it's great they've improved that and they had that sort of a bit of a stumble in February, but that's now improved to 5.8. Only 5.8% of people are talking about login issues.

But obviously we can see from the likes of US Bank that can get down to single digits if you get that right. So, I can also look at other areas, for example, Reliability.

That's also followed a similar path, that the massive reliability issues in August have been fixed and improved upon up until April, which brings it down to about 9%.

The same measures that the SURF model, just having a look at what's happened between March and April, for Truist and we can see that across the board, they've improved across all those things, and that's on top of improvements they've had previously. So, continued improvement like this starts to really, really make the score go up in a nice way. 

What I'm going to look at now is is a look at basically look at in here. What I can see is looking at this SURF model again, but all the detail that's underneath that so one of the things I can see here is that if I look at even though they've had an improvement from from March, a score of 2.5 up to April of 3.1, what I can see is there's still some things going on, some other areas they can improve on.

And one of the things we're looking at here is features. And I can see that things like this money transfer and payment features have actually gone up slightly in terms of a pain point. So it's going from about four and a half up to about 5.3 so not very good in that sense. So let's have a quick look at or at money transfer and have a look at how that looks on the right over here.

So one of the things we're seeing is this, this, this is the old problem. So let's have a look at what people are saying about that. And it's really interesting. This looks at this looks to be the big thing, April, that's going on. So even those giving giving a four out of five are saying "we've had a few problem with Zelle", "unable to access it." "Having probably problems daily with transferring", etc.

So what I can see here also it's happened obviously this is Truist and I can see here it's happened with the update, which is the 1.60 update. So that's the one that seems to have caused this issue. So even even down here, we're getting people getting errors and various versions and issues so it's not working for them.

So that particular functionality is actually not working at this point. It's another level of improvement that Truist can go through. So that's an update for April. And I want to see obviously there's a lot of areas still still improve on, but that improvement we're seeing, I expect that to continue if they if they continue the way they're going.

08:09 Glenn: Some great insights there my friend. It's amazing when you have the ability to get down to, yet again, the granularity of those little things that consistently impact. All of those little things add up to making big improvements over time, and while we are, well, I particularly have consistently referred to them as perennial under-performers, Truist has got all the hallmarks in place of making some good gains when they continue to make those little improvements across the board. 

So, thanks my friend. Fantastic, as usual to get those insights, looking at these pain points and really digging into them with the power of Ipiphany.

If you want to get regular insights updated every single month, we do these sessions each month across the UK and the US Markets. 

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