September 2022 US Regional Banks App Performance Snapshot

In this month’s US Regional banking app snapshot we turn our attention to Fifth Third Bank, with rankings at the lowest point they have been in the past 12 months.

Fifth Third needs to get on top of their issues or they’ll be in danger of things snowballing out of control.

Fifth Third Bank have experienced a bit of a drop across time and are currently sitting at the lowest point to date within the last 12 months. In this snapshot we jump into the Engaged Customer Score data using Touchpoint Group’s Ipiphany software to understand what the issues are and what Fifth Third can do to turn things around.

Tony begins the investigation looking at the data from an Android and iOS perspective. It is immediately clear that the drop and subsequent movement in the scores is predominantly affecting Android users. Tony isolates the timeframe to have a look in terms of what's happened in the 3-month period of July to September, and we can see that Authentication issues such as logging in, rose to 18% by September, equating to nearly 1 in 5 Fifth Third customers talking about authentication problems in the app. Connected to this problem we are seeing a massive increase in Reliability issues, now more than triple the level from July. It comes as no surprise that technical issues have more than tripled from 11% up to 35%, so more than a third of customers are talking about some sort of technical issue.

All in all, it is not very good for Fifth Third to have issues across the board. They will need to pick their act up swiftly in order to address the issues pertaining to version 3.65.3. If they do not act now these problems may become long-term issues that will be much harder to come back from.

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

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Full Transcript

00:00:05 - Glenn: Hi everybody and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Insight Session and we're looking at the banking that performance of the U.S Regional Banks for September 2022 at the moment. And in particular the topic du jour is going to be Fifth Third Bank and Tony Patrick it's not necessarily the topic du jour from them with Fifth Third Bank at the moment because they're at the lowest point they have been in the past 12 months and really it comes down to and what I'm really interested in having a look at today Tony is the impact of that Operating System updates can have across the board on experience and in particular The Fifth Third Tony, it's... it's around the Android updates, isn't it?

00:00:47 - Tony: Yeah. Definitely, yeah. Thanks Glenn and so yeah FifthThird is what we're covering today as part of the U.S Regionals but we also have a look- a quick look at TD Bank, Regions, Citizens, KeyBank and Huntington. So let's just jump in and have a look at how that score is going and as Glenn said, we are seeing a bit of a drop across time. One of the things we're looking at here is from October last year up until September now. So let's have a quick look though we can see things like for example: Citizens... They sort of- they jumped up in August but they've lost that in September we’re seeing a somewhat of a dip for TD Bank back to levels they had at
the start of the year but, they're still in the lead at this point. So, not a major thing for them but they need to watch out they don't go any lower.

One of the things sort of bumping around the bottom is Huntington. Although they had a bit of a lift up in July/ August that's come back down in September and there's still like only I think it was only once in April this year they're ahead of any of the others that are ahead of in this point here. They're ahead of KeyBank at that point only because KeyBank dipped to its lowest point. Huntington still has a lot of room to move. But one of the things I'm seeing which is what we see across other Banks is I can see Key Bank here has moved from a score which is above 3.5 to looking now at below 3 and it's the lowest it's been across the past 12 months. And one of the things we see as a general rule of thumb is if you start- if you drop three times across a period then you've, you're going to have at least another three months before you pick back up to a to a good period. Because it's like a systematic- a systemic thing that's actually happening to your app that you need to get on top of if you haven't gone on top of it early that can last for half a year if you don't watch out.

So let's jump in and understand a bit about Fifth Third and see what they can actually do. First of all I've had a quick look at this from an Android and iOS perspective. One of the things you can see here is that the thing that's dropped is pretty much Android. We can see a little drop in September for iOS um and again that's fairly low so iOS is contributing but the movement in the scores come from Android and that drop down. So let's have a look as well at what's going on in terms of now. I'll just hide this right panel for the moment. Let's have a look in terms of what's happened between July and September for Fifth Third. So we can see in July they had only 3.6% mentioning anything about Authentication issues and logging in type issues so that's pretty good. And we sort of say if you get below 3% you start to get it sets in the good territory, get below 1% you're sort of the top of the game. But 18% in September is not good. Getting nearly you know, nearly 1 in 5 talking about authentication problems so not very good at all. And that's also connected to this massive increase in Reliability issues. More than triple the level from July so that's part- that's only in the past two months it's dropped away to this sort of level. One of the things we can see though is just at a brief snapshot is like where is this coming from?

So, we saw before that the Android level dropped so we can get a hint about what's going to happen here but in a quick snapshot I can see obviously Fifth Third because that's the actual bank we're looking at but Android compared to iOS Android is over-indexing. Which is why it's bigger I can also see it's version 6 3.65.3 of the app and there's some little niggly problems with other versions. But this latest version is a thing that's caused the problem so there's been a little- a couple of months in a row with potentially things that should have been fixed that haven't been and they've been sort of made worse in this most recent update.

So a fairly- and again, even if I have a look at sort of other areas like Authentication problems we get a very familiar picture there too. It's pretty much Android version 3.65.3 has caused that issue, so they need to actually pick their act up in this area and improve that across the board. So, let's have a look though at a couple of things. So that one about reliability we can hone in a little bit deep but we can go obviously a lot deeper than this let's hone in things like in this case here we're honing in on technical issues so technical issues have more than tripled at about 11 up to up to 35. So more than a third of customers are talking about some sort of technical issue which is not very good for Fifth Third. Let's just jump in and have a look at that in September and get some examples of what's coming through. So again, these are fairly broad technical issues so looking at things like: "I can't sign in... It's buggy. It doesn't work... It keeps crashing... It won't even log in without updating the app". So, sort of an idea about where this is happening for customers someone has to uninstall and reinstall all the time. So, even basic stuff. "the app just crashes when I hit to make a payment". Obviously when people have these issues they happen across the board that's what it's looking like so one of the things that does happen is your Journey Experience starts to drop across the board. This isn't just something one part that's happened, it's happening across the board in a fair few areas so what we can do though as well is look at these longer comments to get a bit more detail in here.

The shorter ones just hone in on the actual area that we need to see but also looking at here, we can sort of see it's a- yeah. "won't let me in... Keeps telling me to download the app..." So there's massive problems for customers which is really frustrating for them. What we can do is let's have a look at in here, as I mentioned, what we end up with is if you're having these crashes and bugs across the board it's going to impact your particular Journeys. Now, one making P2P Payments looks to have actually increased slightly, so there's probably been some improvements there but across the board we can see the score for these groups is a lot lower. So, a basic thing like Checking your Account Balance when people talk about that, they were averaging about 2.8 not good in the- from a Global Perspective, but it's still reasonable compared to now it's 1.8. So, people are having a very bad time in the most recent- the recent month. Let's have a quick look at that in terms of what they're talking about here.

Now we're getting down to really minor detail for a specific month but what we're looking at here is we can see the detail of- "it's horrible. I can't even check my balance" So that seems like a very basic thing you want to do with your banking app. "I can't check my balance" etc etc. Now what we can see here attached to some of these comments we know what version of the app is sitting here and a very familiar face pops up: version 3.65.3 That's the one that's caused the issue. We know what's going on and- but it stems from these changes that have happened recently and they're extending into affecting the Journeys for customers as well. So, not a good- a big problem here, for Fifth Third if they don't address these big things straight away because that third month of down which we probably could see next month would be a long-term thing for them they need to actually need to actually fix.

00:07:53 - Glenn: Thanks, Tony. And it just reiterates those fundamental operating issues impact everything across the board including the Journey Experience and the User Experience so when you get on top of those, that makes it so much easier to focus on the little things that end up making a big difference on the end of the user experience, doesn't it?

00:08:12 - Tony: Definitely.

00:08:13 - Glenn: Great stuff. All right team, well if you want to have a chat about your banking app and how you can improve your experience give us a call and we'll catch up with you next month.