June 2022 US Regional Banks App Performance Snapshot

Consistency remains the biggest concern for the US Regional banks, with Huntington as the perennial underperformer. In fact, when it comes to Huntington, being behind the rest of the market is where we see them demonstrating the most consistency.

As a bank that claims to “defy expectations” the Huntington mobile app clearly misses the mark.

In this month’s snapshot the focus is on the underperformers. With Engaged Customer Scores (ECS) averaging around 2.5 Huntington is a poor performer, and has been for some time. Further analysis of Huntington’s scores indicate a ‘whack-a-mole’ approach to fixing issues - illustrated by up-down fluctuations over time. This tells us that Huntington’s problems are reappearing in different forms and a strategy to address these is needed for Huntington to get ahead.

We delve into Huntington’s ECS, starting with SURF analysis for an overview of how their app performs in the 4 key areas of: Security, Usability, Reliability, and Functionality.

It is evident that Huntington is by far the clear underperformer in all areas, and that they have a long way to go if they want to turn things around.

With an app that is plagued with technical issues and falls well short in areas of reliability, is Huntington up the proverbial creek without a paddle?

It will be interesting to see how the widespread power outages cited by Huntington that prevented customers from accessing the app will impact their ECS in future snapshot reviews.

Interested in your bank’s app performance? Contact Touchpoint Group today. We can organise a specific insights session for you.

Video Segments
Intro – 00:00:01
Engaged Customer Score Performance – 00:00:48
SURF Analysis: Huntington – 00:03:18
Huntington’s Technical Issues – 00:05:30
Conclusion – 00:07:42

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Glenn: Hello everybody and welcome back to another Banking App Insight Session and we are looking at the US Regional Banks for June of 2022. Wow! What an up and down show it is there! With the exception of TD Bank who seem to be consistently performing well.

Consistency is probably the theme that we're going to be covering in this session. And it's not great consistency, is it, Tony Patrick? With consistency seeming to really hurt every other bank in this segment, and Huntington especially is the perennial underperformer. We're going to have a look at that and see where things may be going quite badly wrong.

00:00:48 Tony: Great. Thank you, Glenn. Yeah, consistency is the biggest concern here. We mentioned TD bank and we'll have a look at in a second where we see the Engaged Customer Score, but, today looking at Huntington, we'll see why in a moment so, let's jump in and have a look at some scores.

One of the things we can see here, this is our Engaged Customer Score, this is essentially those who are giving a comment and a score, and this is the best way to see real movement. So, if your app is having a problem you will see it pretty much straight away to the day in this data. We do see that like in red here we have TD. So, I'll just highlight that here.

We see they had some issues at the end of last year, the start of this year, but they seem to have picked up, and what we're not seeing with TD is those big month-to-month drops, ups-and-downs. And they seem to be consistent from March and that seems to - that's how you can be a leader, is that consistency.

Now, the one that's bumping up against TD is Fifth Third. One of the things about them, that consistency is not good. They tend to jump up and down with the month. Just about with a few months in between of fixing something and then it tends to jump back down again. They're in a bit of that low at the moment. They've got a few months of sitting just above 3.5 whereas previously they were sitting just below 4. Then again, consistency is an issue there.

What I want to focus on today though is, we can see here, one of the banks here, Huntington. They have consistently been behind the market and that's obviously a problem in its own right. Averaging between around 2.5, somewhere around there. Not that good in the game. They're suffering from that up-and-down issue whereas - we've mentioned in other sessions about ‘Whack-a-Mole’. They seem to be fixing something, then fixing the next thing and so on, and moving forward. So, they need a bit of a strategy about how they can actually get on top of these things earlier and make sure they're not happening consistently and that makes your score go up. One of the things we're seeing here is like we haven't - bumping along at just about 2.25 for this year but, they've actually had a drop into June. So that's an issue for them.

They've actually got lower than that low level so that's a problem. Let's have a look at why that's going on. One of the first things, one of our diagnostics we first look at, for those who are used to this you'll understand how important this actually is. What we're looking at here is our SURF analysis which looks at the basics of actually making an app work.

You get your Security: can I log in properly? Your Usability, your Reliability, and your Functionality. In here, the lower the score the better because that's showing you don't have issues in that area, whereas here what we're looking at is between May and June for Huntington. There are more Reliability issues. It's gone from 44 up to 57, there's a big jump there. That's probably the biggest thing actually. Reliability issues have jumped up. But, Usability problems have also jumped up 7 points there. Just to give you some slight context about what is 56, is that good or bad? It looks bad in its own right where more than half of your customers are talking about reliability problems.

Let's see how well that compares to the others in this segment. Let's look at it by bank. What I can quickly see is that Huntington is sitting at 57%, That’s what we saw in here, that's well above others. We're getting some at 48.35% but, the best here, we've got TD for example, is at 12% and that's a massive gap between what's good and what a really bad underperformer in this space is. That's some context from there.

One of the things that we also like to look at –frequency is interesting but, I want to see how much this is impacting my score. The people that talk about the topic of Reliability, how much is it dragging my score backwards? I can see that in May it was 0.34% taking your score backwards by 0.34%.

That's bad enough of its own right. So, if you fix these issues in a sense, you could actually gain 0.34% in your score, which Huntington are looking for an increase in their score. In June, it's got even worse. They've lost another 0.2 points just on this Reliability issue, and again there's other drops elsewhere which can be covered in other sessions. When we haven't checked closely with our clients around this.

00:05:13 Glenn: And on a five-point scale that's significant.

00:05:16 Tony: That's significant, a 0.2 drop you've just lost 0.2 points on a particular issue with Reliability so, it's a massive thing.

What I can look at next is this sort of issue, there are other areas like Technical issues and App not working etc. and App crashes. Now, App crashes hasn't gone up by much. It was 2.4%, it's gone to 3.2%, but technical issues broadly have increased. Let's have a quick look at what they might be.

If I have a look in here around these technical issues on the right panel, I might focus on some things that are the really negative ones or maybe even just the ones and twos, probably a better way of looking at it. And what I can see in here when this pops up, for example, people not being able to log in: "the app just doesn't work", "the new version is broken", "there's a blank screen". Lots of different issues popping through in those Technical issues. That Reliability problem is going across lots of different areas including the app freezing and other various things like that. You're not a good look when a customer is trying to do something basic with your app.

Let's have a brief look at some particular features sitting in here or things that you actually want to do or want to actually get to do with your app.

So, Monitoring Account Activity, Checking Account Balance, and Making P2P payments. You think they're fairly straightforward, what an app should actually excel on, a bank app should. The score when people talk about these previously in May were 3.2 for account activity, you're monitoring your account activity. It's now 1.6. Again, there's issues across various features and journeys in the app as well. For example, if I want to look at this one about Checking Account Balance - that's had a major drop from 3.2 down to 1.2. Definitely issues happening in June in this particular area.

One of the things in here is people actually can't check their account balance. "It'd be nice to be able to see my balance", "It's not letting me check my account balance or anything", "It can't connect to the internet". A basic thing like seeing your account balance cannot be done by lots of customers. Again, if they're not aware of this - I'm sure they should be but, that's a major thing they should be fixing pretty much straight away.

We can see there that Huntington had some issues, but they just got worse recently and if they aren't on top of them. This could be a major problem for months to come.

00:07:45 Glenn: Yeah, and a serious indicator of churn risk and if you cannot get basic functionality right you are putting everything at risk in regards to customer retention.

Thanks again Tony. Another great session and look forward to looking at some of the other market segments and the other sessions coming up.

00:08:05 Tony: Thank you.