September 2022 US Market Tier 1 Banks App Performance Snapshot

In this month’s snapshot of US Tier 1 banking apps we take a closer look at Truist and discover that whilst they are doing well compared to how they were historically, there's still room to improve.

Growing pains caused by recent merger are still affecting Truist customers.

At first glance Truist’s app ranks well overall and improvement of their Engaged Customer Scores can be seen, with a rise from 2.2 in February to 3.8 in September. This indicates that many of the teething issues of the recent merger of BB&T and SunTrust have been addressed. However, all may not be what it seems, so we turn the spotlight onto Truist to see what’s really going on for their customers.

As we take a closer look into the Truist banking app we learn that there are problems with some of the app’s features that are causing frustration for Truist customers, and at a greater level than other Tier 1 Banks. Some of the issues highlighted relate to problems with the cheque features, and a problematic issue of customer’s account balances being incorrect or not matching up to what people expect.

Not only is this issue frustrating for customers but a key component is that they have a cohort of new customers acquired through the merger who not only have had to get used to the new app and some of its interface shortfalls, and to make matters worse, they have lost some of the features they were previously using.

Let’s hope Truist can smooth out some of the problems and deliver a better experience for their customers, both new and existing. If they set their sights on catching up with the likes of Capital One and put in the effort to continue traveling on the up-and-up, they could catch up and get themselves to the level of others. Room for improvement, but at least the movement is in a positive direction so we would like to see Truist continue to improve.

US Tier 1 banks Engaged Customer Score (ECS) performance rankings for September 2022

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Full Transcript 

00:00:05 –Glenn: Hello everybody and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session and we are looking at the US Tier 1 Banks for the month of September. And Tony Patrick it's a good news story of some sorts with the rise of Truist with some initial teething problems since the merger of BB&T and SunTrust, but it looks like they're getting on top of things.

00:00:27 –Tony: Yeah definitely, Glenn. So, thanks for that. So yeah US Tier 1. What we'll look at today is we cover off the U.S Bank, Capital One, PNC and Truist so let's just jump straight into it with our standard look at how those scores are going. So I'll jump into Truist in a moment, but it's always good to see this sort of the standard, like U.S Bank is one of the ones that globally is doing very well and it's consistently sitting up there and although that we did see a bit of a dip in March and we can look at why that might be at a different time but now for those familiar with this you would have seen this Engaged Customer Score we use. This is a score out of 5 from the Google Play and the App Store. And what this is, is basically the Engaged Customers are the ones who've given a score and a comment. They're the ones who are engaged, they're the ones who have a real experience to share. And it allows us to get really sensitive in terms of movements in this data to see what's really going on underneath of all the data that comes through. 

So, and again I'll just step down into Capital One. So Capital One is doing pretty well too, they've had a bit of a rise into September but they're always that gap- I think we've covered that previously- that gap between Capital One and U.S Bank. That's something that could be closed but hasn't been in the short term. But, let's look at Truist. So, Truist. Obviously there's some initial problems with anyone from SunTrust and BB&T has come in and actually they have obviously had to have a new app and a new brand attached to that and they've had teething issues you can see here up until February it's been up and down and even it's well below others. But, since February this year there's been a month on month increase all the way up to the current increase into September. So, it's 3.8 now but back in February were sitting at 2.2. So, a very positive experience if you're a Truist customer and from what I can see here you can only expect that to increase further and potentially start to even compete with Capital One up there as well. So let's jump in and have a look at what's happened across that time. So, this is our standard look to say what are the pain points? What are the things customers are talking about in terms of their problems? What we can see here quickly, look at the blue in February. Now this one here is about pain points so of course the higher it is, the worse it is. We want these pain points to be as low as we can, suppress them down and then we can start to really improve our score. Actually, one of the things we do cover off in the framework we have is once you get these down to a relatively good level then customers can experience your journeys in in the way that they should be experienced. But if someone can't log in or it just doesn't work then they can't experience your app to its full extent, so get these right first.  

What we can see though there's some big things, like Security/Authentication,  Logging in. About  1 in 10 customers in February were saying "I've got a problem logging in" so that's a massive problem. We get down now to about 3% so, not best practice just yet but down to 3% is pretty good. The user interface was an issue. So, probably customers are changing apps from their previous one in the past now they've come into here, it's down now to about 6% as a problem so that's massive, that's gone, you know, less than half there. So, let's have a look though at that across time. So these are the same things we just saw so Security/Authentication we saw it got down to 3% now. It's the lowest it's ever been across the the past year or so and it was as we said in February  was up around 10% but it was in October for around 13. So, that is a massive increase. One of the things I can see though is this thing around User Interface. That was the biggest problem for people up until February this year. But that has dropped away and it's declining month on month and it's now the sort of the third...  the third biggest issue. The first being the one around the sort of issues with features. But again all of these are getting down to nice levels in terms of where they've been in the past.

However, let's have a look at what else we can see in here... is looking at how does that compare to others though. So you can say Okay, okay, Truist is doing well compared to how they were historically but there's still room to improve. So we saw there that we had for Truist we had it at 3% in September, this is September now, but others are getting a lot lower than that. So, for example U.S Bank only has about 1% in terms of the Security/Authentications of logging and issues. So, that is best practice getting below 2 but getting below 1 is sort of is next level. Obviously, PNC at this stage has a higher level.

May on the right here one of the things I can see is the issues with features is also causing an issue, a problem for Truist customers, and that's well above others so obviously we can see here that Truist still has room to improve. There's a lot they can still do to get to that level of others and as I said if they can chase Capital One as the next target that would be great. And I reckon that the way they're traveling it could be 3 to 4 months and they'll get towards that level. Let's have a quick look at some of the things around those features. Now one of the things- I've had a quick explore on this- now one of the things is obviously they've improved a lot of things but there's still room to improve elsewhere. So, in February we had this thing around Poor App Check Feature you want this to be as low as you can. It's around 2% it's doubled to around 4 in September so there's more issues popping through for the Check Feature as an issue for customers. And we can get some examples of what's coming through there.  

What I might do is I'll filter down to some of these more angrier customers for example. Those giving us the 1 and 2 and let's have a look at what they're up to. Now often these are fairly standard things like this one here though doesn't look very standard: "Taking a picture of the check causes the app to crash". Again this is just for Truist and it fails after taking a picture of the cheque. The mobile deposits really works. I can't take pictures. So, again that's a sort of double so clearly there's some issues there that need to to attack to continue that growth they have which is really good.  

One of the things we can also look at is a bit more detail on other features as well. So we saw there that the Cheque Deposit Feature- I'm just looking at it from July to September now. I can see for Truist they're scoring a 2.4 out of 5 when people talk about cheque deposit, we see that's gotten a little bit worse recently. But we can see there that best practice is coming from U.S Bank. So when someone talks about check deposit it's very positive, it's very positive coming through from them. And even the basic stuff like checking my account balance is it's a fairly like it's a somewhat poor experience for customers here we're getting sort of you know some basic problems here. If I go down again to those negative people... so I'll filter down to the negative ones in here. If we check the account balance. Let's have a look at what we see in here. So again this is just for Truist and just for Checking Account Balance.  

"The available balance bears little relation to how much money you actually have",  "money disappears" so there's problems with the account balance not matching up to what people expect.  

So yeah, if people's lives are hanging in the balance counting on this service so it's not a nice thing for the customers here. So again this is one here from a from a previous user of BB&T: "The app updated and I had to use the Truist app" which is, you know, obviously everyone had to move across. And "the ability to use the QuickView Balance widget disappeared".  

So there's features that disappeared from the previous versions for BB&T customers in here as well. So it shows there's still room to Improvement and I think one of the things we have here is we're looking at basically we need to improve across a lot of areas it's not just one. And from what the way they're going though they're sitting on top of a few things but there's some probably some things they're still missing. So, thank you, Glenn.  

00:08:38 – Glenn: Yeah, great stuff. And it's good to see that they have made some good strides forward in those operational areas but, like you say still some work to do and looking forward to tracking them over the months to come. Thanks team, you have a great month.