October 2022 US Regional Banks App Performance Snapshot

In this month’s snapshot of US regional banks we are pleased to be reporting on Huntington and their incredible jump up from the bottom to the top position, proving that if you're fanatical about the basics the rest can shine.

A prime example of best practice in action

In the past, Huntington had been sitting around the bottom position of the top-5 U.S Regional banking apps Engaged Customer Score™ (ECS) rankings. In October of this year something has taken place to propel Huntington forward rather dramatically, taking their ECS from the mid 2’s up to a 4.

US Regional banks Engaged Customer Score performance rankings for October 2022

To provide context before we investigate why Huntington has had such a dramatic rise in the rankings Tony provides an overview of the previous quarter’s global ECS rankings. Here we can see that in the July-September period Huntington has moved well up the rankings, past the other US regionals; to the top-level positions currently dominated by the UK banking apps.

It is evident that Huntington has been following best practice for an app launch with new versions released every month, meaning customers are being provided with improvements to the apps and not left to endure problems for too long. It is the most recent version for October (6.32.231) that is contributing to the massive spike in their ECS rankings, with overall pain points less than half that of the previous month.

Using the Touchpoint Group SURF analysis framework to provide an overview of how the app performs across the 4 essential attributes of Security, Usability, Reliability, and Functionality we can see that pain points around ‘Reliability’ have reduced significantly meaning there are far fewer instances of reliability and technical problems - enabling greater opportunity to focus on the bigger picture of Customer Journeys.

Tony demonstrates how the analysis uncovers what’s happening beneath these monthly rankings by digging into the customer feedback data and benchmarking this against others to reveal more insights. It is demonstrated how improvements to ‘Reliability’ have had a massive flow-on effect across all 4 SURF pillars.

This month’s snapshot on Huntington is an exemplary case study of a key theme. Evidence shows that if you focus on getting fundamental attributes of your app right, you are better able to perform well in areas of customer journeys and the app functionalities, because customers can actually use the app as it is intended.

Would you like to find out how well your bank performs? Contact Touchpoint Group today. We can provide you with a customized insights session.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 – Glenn: Hello, and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insight Session. We're looking at the U.S. Regional Banks for the month of October. Tony Patrick, doing what we do, the data speaks for itself. And you know, we just report the news. So, we're often seen as the bearer of bad news. So, this month it's actually great to report on the amazing progress made by Huntington.

Now, we've highlighted the data around some of the negative experiences that people have been having in the past. It's actually fantastic to be able to report on the massive positive impact and gains that the latest update has given Huntington. Over to you and, let's spread some nearly Christmas cheer.

00:00:57 – Tony: It is. It is great to bring some good news. Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, today we're looking at the U.S. Regionals covering T.D. Bank, Regions, Fifth Third, Citizens, KeyBank and of course, Huntington. Let's move into this straight away and just have a look at our Engaged Customer Score. Those familiar with this will understand but, the Engaged Customer Score is essentially those giving both a score and a comment in the app stores and they give feedback. That allows us to have a really sensitive movement as to what's happening and not be sort of blocked out by the bland information that keeps a lot of these apps sort of flat. When we see a movement in this data we actually know why because there's a comment attached to everything that's going on here. So, one of the things we can see is that historically we can see that Huntington was sitting- it's sitting below a few others sitting in here.

But, again what we can see here though is that something has happened in October, an amazing movement that is brought at the head of others, and I suppose there are a couple of small things going on as well. We can see that T.D. dropped at that same time. They had issues coming along and again, they need to obviously repair those in the short term and not let those drag on.

But what I will look at is Huntington's. That's an amazing jump from around 2.75 or around 2.5 up to actually around 4. Let's uncover what's going on here because it's a big movement and we know why has happened. So, before we go into here what we want to look at is the context of the previous quarters. This is before this movement went up. And so Huntington's sitting sort of in this U.K... ranking. What they've actually done leapfrogged all the other U.S. regionals and to be sort of in the -towards the threshold of moving into this team to the top level.

So it's a really positive move and there are multiple things going on underneath it. Let's have a look at what's actually happening inside here. First of all, let's have a look at Huntington and its app launch...perspective. Pretty much every month it's actually jumping up in terms of frequency of certain apps we can see here... So here's version 6.25.275 and each month there's a dominant one coming through which is really good. This is best practice from a launch process, we're not having multiple versions sitting around long term which we're seeing with others. We can see here as one drops away another one dominates and that's a really nice way of doing it so you're not -you do not sort of, I suppose customers aren't sitting around with old problems, as Huntington fixes something it can't come through. The version we're looking at now -for October is version 6.32.231 and that's the one where this impact is coming through strongly. You can see that massive Improvement. What I'll do now, I will have a look -we'll have a look at a bit of detail about what's happened here.

So to give you a bit of navigation about what I'm showing you, I can see -this is just for Huntington, and what I can see is their score. This chart at the top here is their score moving from about 2.5 up to 4. One of the things we can see is that this red area is pain points. Pain points have more than halved from this point here, 52% of comments were pain points down to around 21% pain points in October. So, a great Improvement. Obviously, Huntington knows exactly what they've done that we can see here the outcome of what's actually happened. The biggest thing here is things like Reliability. Reliability has actually gone amazingly well. So it was about 40% odd, it's gone down to about 15%. So it has dropped 26 percentage points. People are less likely to be talking about Reliability and technical issue problems which means they can focus on the good Journeys that Huntington has inside here, inside the app. Technical issues have also dropped by about 25 points down to about 15%. Things like bugs have gone down 10 points. There were about 13% gone down to 2.7%. Really positive movements sitting inside here.

But let's have a look though at what's actually happening underneath this. If I look at Unreliable App, what I can do is compare -so the current month Huntington is at 15.2%, is that good? Have they actually gone to the level that's expected? Let's have a look. We can benchmark this against others and what we're seeing here is the frequency. Frequency of Unreliability is 15.2% That is the best in October and it's better than Citizens, Santander and doing very well in this scheme of things. Very positive and I think... -take a learning from that app version and keep this up. It's gonna be a massive improvement across time as well.

What I can also do is look at things like Bugs -Have App Bugs improved? So again, not quite first but, 2.7% Bugs is well ahead of a lot of others that are sitting in here. A very positive move ahead for Huntington. And if you look at... -One of the things we can also look at, if just -I'll move it away from here, what is actually going on from... Now, those regular watchers here will understand this SURF Analysis which covers 4 key areas and these are all pain points so, lower is better. So, Security, Authentication, Usability, Reliability and Functionality are the 4 key things that makeup SURF. One of the things we see, if you can improve on Reliability, you can also improve elsewhere. So, we see Reliability as the biggest mover. It's actually gone from 41% of customers commenting down to 15% And that has had a massive flow-on effect. So, Usability and Functionality suddenly can start -as I said the journeys that Huntington has actually built, have actually... -can actually shine and we can see there very quickly, Usability issues have dropped Functionality issues have dropped, Authentication issues have dropped...So, a massive Improvement across time there. This is what you can do. It's one of those stages you can go through which will really improve what's happening with your app, improve the Reliability and everything will flow through from there. So, thank you, Glenn.

00:07:15 – Glenn: Yeah, this is almost the perfect case study of what we have been talking about for a long time around if you almost to the point of being fanatical about getting those foundational attributes right in your app and around Access, Login, Technical -ironing out technical bugs, then it allows and it frees the app up to actually shine with all of those features and journeys and functionalities that you're building into it. Because if people are struggling to get in and do some of the basic functions that they need to do to be able to experience it, it doesn't matter how many great functions and Journeys and features that you've got in it people are not going to be happy. So, if you're fanatical about the basics, the rest can shine.