Today Mobiquity – a full-service digital transformation enabler that delivers compelling digital products and services that serve a purpose, by blending strategy, creative and engineering – launches a ‘Friction Report to benchmark UK & NL mobile banking apps,’ identifying ‘frictions’ within the UK digital banking app customer experience.

The study of 50,000+ UK customer banking app reviews within the Google Play Store and the App store shows the main ‘frictions’ across prominent UK retail banks.

One of the key issues was with login and password authentication. Nearly a third (30%) of digital banking app customers had issues logging into the app through their devices and 1 in 5 (20%) cited problems with username and password or password authentication.

Another ‘friction’ was customer service; nearly a quarter (24%) of users felt like they were waiting too long for customer support.

Almost a quarter (24%) cited problems with notifications. Either the wrong operation was performed, or no operation was performed at all when they clicked on the notification icon. 23% didn’t receive notifications for payments while 1 in 5 (20%) received too many notifications.

Meanwhile, over 1 in 5 (22%) were unhappy with the customer resolution, and over 1 in 10 (16%) customers cited that the support over chat was unavailable or not useful.

Commenting on the report, Matthew Williamson, Vice President of Global Financial Services, Mobiquity, said: “As the use of digital payments increases during the pandemic, so has mobile banking usage. The launch of Mobiquity’s Banking Friction Report helps banks to identify the ‘business frictions’ in their mobile banking experience to help align with evolving customer expectations.”

“An interesting observation that can be made is that most of the banking apps in the Google Play and App store score highly, but when you only account for reviews where people actually leave comments regarding an app feature, i.e. feature ratings, scores are quite low. This can be attributed to users no longer having to proactively go to the Google Play or App store to rate an app, but now are prompted to review an app while they are using it.”

“Nowadays, banks cannot risk treating their customers as passive observers, building products and features that do not take their feedback into consideration. Looping customer feedback into the decision-making process is key as banks get real-time information regarding which aspect of the app customers value the most, and where they find the most friction while interacting with the app.”