Digital performance evaluation : how we changed our indicators in 2022

indicators-2022

Each year, D-Rating evolves its model for rating the digital performance of retail banks. This work is done in conjunction with stakeholders in the banking industry (in particular D-Rating’s clients and prospects). You can click here https://www.d-rating.com/form-digital-performer/ to learn more about digital performance rating methodology by D-Rating.

The objective is to take into account the trends observed in digital banking (our mobile app Market Alerts service https://www.d-rating.com/try-market-alerts-60-days/  is a great help for us). What is important in the success of customer journeys? What are the new innovative or must-have features? What are the points that are no longer a subject of digital performance (two decades ago, it would have been interesting to see if the bank had a website with an authenticated space; today it is no longer a subject).

Moreover, beyond the trends in customer usage, it seems important to us to measure performance in terms of economic performance and the challenges of winning over customers, building loyalty and generating value/increasing the customer basket.

The use of digital for value generation seems more and more important to us. On the one hand client acquisition (full digital account opening journey) seems less of an issue (most banks have caught up with the account opening journeys offered by neo-banks) but on the other hand the macro-economic context is directing economic players towards more value generation vs. acquisition of new customers.

Thus our model is evolving and merging the Journeys and Offers aspects. The number of types of offers evaluated increases significantly compared to 2021 and for the most part we evaluate the bank with regard to the proposed customer journey  (without doing end-to-end journeys, the products being too much engaging for a tester).

The products we are looking at are the following:

  • Mortgage loan
  • Personnal loan, BNPL
  • Brokerage Account
  • Junior Account
  • Cashback
  • Beyond banking / Supper App offers
  • Payment cards

The account opening journey is now much more discriminating in its evaluation: account opening evaluation will be focused on digitization, transparency, speed and ergonomics. Account opening journeys starting in Branch will get no point at all in our evaluation.

We enriched the evaluation of the journeys with a little more notions of User Experience with in particular the following points of attention which seems to us important both for questions of trust but also of incentive to achieve the subscription journey successfully:

  • No more distinction between native app and web app for the performance evaluation; now it is evaluated from the customer’s point of view; if a journey is in web app and the transition is not visible to the customer, then all points are awarded. In the past we kept as important the notion of having distinct elements between the web and the app. However, as this is a subscription process and therefore not often used, this distinction no longer seems important to us, on the contrary, from a ROI perspective.
  • Possibility to navigate backward during subscription of main banking products is also be evaluted
  • Existence of encountered bugs is measured for all subscription journeys; until now the presence of bugs was only measured for account opening journeys

Compared to previous years and to make the difference with the offer-oriented journeys, we preferred to reposition the indicators related to the transfers in the « features » part of our evaluation. Beyond the time needed to register a new transfer beneficiary, it is above all the features related to transfers that now make the difference between the banks (possibility of scanning an IBAN, making recurring transfers, etc.).

In the same vein, the « Appointment Scheduling » part, which we have brought closer to the contact channels in a « Customer support » area. The objective is to measure the way banks use digital technology to respond to customer queries. In the same way, we decided to focus our evaluation of contact channels’s reliability on instant digital support(no human interference, mainly chatbot) in order not to evaluate reliability of customer service teams.

To complete these elements, here are examples of indicators added (trend observed in particular through our service of Market Alerts https://www.d-rating.com/try-market-alerts-60-days/ or D-Rating customer request) or deleted (no more relevant):

DELETED

  • Voice notes in chat.
  • Community tool tests.
  • Dark mode for web (keep for app only).
  • Shared money pot for web (keep for app only).
  • Bill splitting for web (keep for app only)
  • Possibility to visualized overdraft.
  • Possibility to auto-identify transactions.
  • Subsidized rates for car credits.

ADDED

  • Co-browsing with chat
  • Pre-filled beneficiaries (energy, telecom providers for example).
  • Consolidated reports of account situation following aggregation.
  • Email question auto responder

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