Commonwealth Bank’s outage-prone mobile app has been a source of frustration for customers throughout the Covid-19 pandemic but user dissatisfaction with chronic service downtimes appears to have counted for little in the eyes of research companies that rate the bank’s app.
Forrester Research yesterday published the findings of its latest review of user experiences for the mobile apps of Australian banks and rated CBA’s platform the best in the market for the fifth year in a row.
The Forrester finding is likely to surprise thousands of CBA mobile customers who have had recurring problems dealing with service outages throughout 2021.
“CommBank retained the top spot by continuously improving its mobile experience,” Forrester announced in its report.
“For the fifth year in a row, CommBank took the top spot for overall digital experience leader, leading in both functionality and User Experience.
“ CommBank excels in money management, money movement, and assisted service.”
Forrester senior analyst Zhi-Ying Barry told Banking Day the firm’smethodology does not take into account a bank’s outage record for measuring the performance and user experience of mobile banking platforms.
That means CBA’s comparative outage performance was not considered in the user experience assessment that was conducted by Forrester in March and April.
According to the Down Detector website, CBA’s digital banking systems suffered a market-leading six outages in April compared to none at ANZ and two fleeting incidents at NAB.
Forrester judged the user experience for CBA’s app as superior to the other major banks based on the assessments of inhouse experts’ against four benchmarks: search result relevance; visual design that aids user comprehension; quality of supporting content; and privacy and security.
Ms Barry acknowledged that Forrester did not interview or survey CBA customers to help form its judgements about user experience.
“Given it’s a heuristic methodology we conducted an expert-led review, so we did not open the process to external user testing,” she said.
“The team assesses each app and reviews the workflows for each bank’s app.
“We always take the approach of looking at it from the perspective of customers.”
Barry said that some outages might be detected by Forrester’s team of experts but that would depend on a service availability incident occurring at the same time as the assessment was being conducted.
“It depends on which date we did the review because we do take in account system errors and availability while we’re doing the reviews,” she said.
CBA got lucky during April when Forrester’s experts were assessing the performance of its app.
According to the Down Detector database, CBA customers reported problems using its mobile app and other digital platforms on the first three days of the month and on three other days.
As Forrester’s experts were forming their glowing judgements about CBA’s app in April, the bank’s social media pacifiers were hard at work on their keyboards trying to deal with marooned account holders:
“We’re aware of an issue with the CommBank app and NetBank affecting credit cards and debit cards. Some card settings may also be unavailable right now. We apologise for disrupting your morning, we’re working urgently to fix this