The emphasis on offering digital banking platforms to meet the expectations of younger generations of consumers, as well as tech-savvy Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, is prevalent among financial institutions today. For companies conscious of the cost associated with providing a mobile customer experience, a new study by J.D. Power has some good news on the subject – simplicity is best.
Whereas a majority of the focus when budgeting for the development of digital platforms has been on creating rich feature sets and making them user-friendly, the study concluded that consumers are most satisfied with their digital banking interactions when they can fully understand how to use their bank’s platform.
“The focus needs to shift to personalization, creating a curated user experience that delivers both convenience and streamlined usability,” J.D. Power concluded in a press release presenting the results.
Approximately 84 percent of retail bank customers surveyed for the study said they had had at least one digital interaction with their banks in the past three months. Seventy-one percent of credit card customers said they’d interacted with their provider’s digital offerings.
“Leading U.S. banks now have more than half of their customers interacting with them in a digitally centric manner,” J.D. Power Vice President of Financial Services Intelligence Bob Neuhaus said in the results. “The trend is most pronounced among the largest national banks, such as Bank of America, which now counts 54 percent of its customers as digitally centric, meaning they do the bulk of their banking without setting foot in a branch. As the number of banking and credit card customers interacting with their providers’ digital channels continues to grow, these digital experiences will become an increasingly fundamental part of the overall brand. It is critical that banks and credit cards get the formula right, delivering the resources customers need while also designing apps to be user-friendly.”
Neuhaus noted that regional and mid-size banks only interact with about a third (or less) of their customers on average, giving larger banks the advantage in winning business from digitally focused consumers.
Scoring their satisfaction with those offerings on a 1,000-point scale, the respondents generally indicated that the more complex the app, the less satisfied they were with their user experience.
For retail bank mobile apps and online banking tools, overall customer satisfaction has fallen 15 points since last year, with both scoring 853 out of 1,000, according to J.D. Power. Consumers indicated higher customer satisfaction with credit card mobile apps (872), in part because they found them generally to be more simple and streamlined.
“J.D. Power finds that customer satisfaction levels with these digital channels have been strained by a surplus of new features that have made them more complex and difficult to use,” J.D. Power said in a press release.
In testing both bank mobile apps and online banking tools, customers were asked to try to completely understand all features offered. The study found that complete customer understanding of a mobile app is associated with a 130-point improvement in overall satisfaction for banking apps and a 122-point improvement for online banking. When striving to make complete understanding attainable for consumers, simplicity is best and presentation counts, too.
“In both cases, customers report strong levels of understanding of features and offer high marks for mobile app appearance,” the release states. “The higher overall satisfaction scores for credit card mobile apps are attributable to a more tailored visual user experience that limits content to pertinent information and key functionality.”
The study also showed that the more often consumers tend to use their bank’s digital offerings, the more satisfied they are with those offerings, particularly among users who said they interact digitally with their bank eight or more times a month.
“Overall, 69 percent of bank mobile app users say their banks mobile app is either a ‘somewhat important’ or ‘very important’ channel in preventing them from switching to a different bank,” the release said.