November 2022 UK Legacy Banks App Performance Snapshot

NatWest Banking App Storms Into 2nd Place In Latest UK Engaged Customer Score Rankings.

The NatWest Banking App Engaged Customer Sore ™ (ECS) had a meteoric rise in November and is snapping on the heels of Lloyds for the top spot to finish out the year.

In what can only be described as a best practice approach to app version releases NatWest has been clinical in executing releases in the second half of 2022 and what was a consistent, gradual increase in positive customer feedback turned into a tsunami in November with the overall Engaged Customer Score rocketing from 4.00 to 5.55 out of a possible 5.00 in November.

UK Main Banks App  Engaged Customer Score  Ranking Nov 2022

It hasn’t always been easy for NatWest with a gradual decline in their engaged customer score for much of the year indicating that there was compounding negativity with small issues that could have flown under the normal checks and alerts. In January, the app was at its highest point before the latest update of 4.3, and over the course of the year, there was a steady decline that would have been almost imperceptible if staff only looked at the overall App Store Scores and impossible to isolate the cause.

A clinical approach to version release with a consistent 4-week cycle has paid dividends, and in Sept, the downward slide was halted. The latest app version (Version 7.24)  should be the version users update to immediately to resolve historic issues.

Tony Patrick, Head of Customer Intelligence at Touchpoint Group, states, “These sorts of gains of over .5 are rarely seen, and while it may be easy to do when your scores are low, to accomplish this sort of stratospheric level up when your ECS is already 4 or above is virtually unheard of”

To take the top spot, the data collected and analysed by Touchpoint Group indicates a clear area of focus, with customers indicating there are still small issues with the cheque deposit function and sporadic biometric login issues. If NatWest can resolve those issues, it will be possible for them to take the number 1 ranking spot from Lloyds, which has dominated rankings for over a year.

Over a million Banking App Engaged Customer Score (ECS) rankings are tracked by Touchpoint Group each year in their global ECS index. Data is updated daily with insights available to identify issues for Operational teams,  monthly reporting for Leadership teams, and a Mobile Customer Experience Analytics (MCXA) report published quarterly for Executive teams to benchmark performance by category and against global leaders.

UK Main Banks Nov 2022 App Performance Transcript

00:00:05 - Glenn: Hello everybody and welcome back to another Touchpoint Group Banking App Insights Session and we're looking at the major UK Banks for the month of November and in particular NatWest who have had a good  jump up in performance and Tony Patrick, you've had  little deep dive there. I'll hand it over to you as you're the guy with the big brain. 

00:00:26 - Tony: Great. Thank you Glenn. 

Today we are looking at Lloyd's, Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander and HSBC. Let's jump straight in and see how those scores have moved. First of all, I'll change this chart for a moment and remove HSBC for the scale purposes but you can see that just on HSBC they have actually had that Improvement and they've maintained it which is amazing, which is great for them. They've actually picked up to above 3.5. They've actually even improved to some extent in November so that's very good. They obviously can maintain that and there's still got a few Banks above them they can still aspire to as well. 

One of the things we can also see is that as Glenn mentioned, NatWest has had that increase in November and it's fairly dramatic. It's gone from a score of around 4 up to around 4.5, above 4.5. Half a point is fairly big on its own but doing that at the top end of the scale is rare. 

You can do it like we saw from HSBC down low and then up to a sort of reasonable level, but into this sort of stratospheric level of up to 4.5 is rare. What we have seen for NatWest is a gradual decline which I'm not sure they would have seen necessarily because this score here is what we call the Engaged Customer Score and that covers anyone who's given both a score and a comment in the App Store or Google Play Store, and that allows this to be very sensitive compared to other measures that anyone might have seen. 

Lets have a dig in and understand why that's happened. This data is coming from both Google Play and App Store apps. You can see they've both had a jump from October, big jump there for App Store for Apple 3.6 up to 4.2 and then Google Play 4 up to 4.6 up here. So they're both lifted which is really positive. And they're going hand in hand across the board as well you can see that that decline, the gradual decline was across both as well. Let's have a look in here at first of all, how NatWest compares in October compared to others and then we'll have a look how it compares in November to others. Broadly we can see here, Natwest on the right here -this is a bit of a helicopter view, just sort of showing what are the things, where do they stand out, where do they over-index on certain things? 

You can see broadly there's a lot of red. We've got a lot of red there's a few slight green things but issue clearly with Cheque Deposits compared to others and also there's things around Mobile App Updates and even a few small things around Battery Usage and so on. So that's where it stands then, let's have a quick flick across then to November and see what it looks like then. Quick glance at what they might look like. Now you can see, first of all, a bit more green coming through, so that's really positive. They're actually doing well in a positive way on a few things. For example, here we've got Good Transfer Between Accounts, we've got Helpful App in general, and Account to Account Transfers positive. That's really good. There's all these features and Journeys are popping through in a positive way. 

We still see trouble with Cheque Deposit though. Clearly, that's an issue that they can still improve on and also, if you've Login Issues coming through as well. But again, very positive for them. They've actually moved in the right direction and it's that next level which start to wipe out the smaller things like Cheque Deposit and App Login in there as well. 

What I'd like to look at now though, is the App Release Cycle for NatWest. Now, this is from -this looks amazing to me. This is basically when the app is released. We can see here, for example, we're commencing this is across the past three months, we're commencing 12th of September we see that version 7.21 drops away, version 7.22 comes on board and pretty much all customers take that on board. They take that through and they take it on board and then it's great. I suppose, there's a bit of trust there as to you know, that app release is pushed through, customers take it on. Excellent. We can see there across here, there's probably like -it looks like a four-week release cycle they have, and that's really positive. They don't have sort of a mix of things we're seeing with other brands. We've got like, people have five different versions of the app floating around out there at the same time. That's not very positive because you're going to get a very different experience as a customer. So here it's really positive as a new app is released it comes through -Great. 

Let's have a look though, we saw broadly the scores. If we look at 7.21 way back here, the score is 3.9. We go to 7.22 the score is 4.1. So each release is having a gradual Improvement 7.23, 4.2 is the score. We hit this latest version though, this is where the score jumps up to 4.7. So not this gradual stuff we've been seeing before, it's a major jump in Improvement. Very positive there from NatWest.

Let's have a quick look though at how this has progressed across time in terms of just that broad helicopter view of the concepts going on here. So in here, we're looking at -there's a few problems here even though they're getting a reasonable score there's Poor Functional Suitability, the App's not  'Working as it should', Poor Update in there. This is way back in -this is September. Let's have a look at the next month and how that improves and progresses forward. Here suddenly it's not all red. We've got a bit of gray in there which means it's going towards that green. We've got things like, there's an issue there with that Battery Usage which hit in October. But let's look at this recent month. We've got this massive increase, so this is where it's really positive and it's moved up. Suddenly we've sort of hit that threshold of -actually you're now actually going head to head and I think being ahead of other banks in here, Good App Usability, Good App Operability, we're getting a lot of things like Journeys popping through here as well and Good Navigation. The improvements they've actually done it's a massive congratulations to them, because actually they've made this Improvement and customers have taken it on board. So well done to that team to have moved that forward. So thank you, Glenn. 

00:07:14 - Glenn: Yet again, focusing on consistency and getting those little things right can have a massive impact across the board. So well done NatWest and looking forward to our January special where we're going to be doing the 2022 year in review looking at all these Banks, and really some of the stories that have popped out and some of the trends that we can identify that are going to help you have an even better 2023. Thanks, folks!