Crashes in Neobank, eBank, and Crypto-trading Apps are Unforgivable — Crash Analytics is the Answer

Regardless of how technically sound the engineering of an app is, bugs, errors, and crashes can happen. So when they do, you must recover from it by doing a deep analysis of the technical aspects and the impact on the overall customer experience. If your crypto-exchange or banking app is not getting the right insights you need from the crashes, your churn rate and your customers will definitely let you know sooner than you think.

Take, for example, what happened some weeks ago. An impressive surge in transactions shook up the crypto market, derived from the plummeting of leading cryptocurrencies. Lots of transactions at the same time meant that some of the apps trading with them ended up crashing. While it was not the first time a peak of transactions caused trouble - some exchanges trading with Dogecoin had slowed down or crashed in early May - this massive trade-off and ensuing technical issues had customers at the brink of filing lawsuits against their trading apps.

Crashes in industries like banking - both transformative eBanks or all-new neobanks - and crypto exchanges can have devastating effects, as financial organizations already suffer from high competition, relatively high attrition, and, therefore, high churn rates. At the end of the day, these companies are dealing with people’s money, and if there is a disruption between them and their money, brace yourself because things will escalate quite quickly.

“My app is sound; why bother with reviews?”

What do crashes have to do with customer reviews? Well, everything! A user who cannot access their money or investments will definitely be more vocal about their (negative) experience, especially if a downpayment was needed to start operating. So, if a crash interrupted the positive experience a hard-won customer was having with an app, bad reviews will ensue!

The correlation between app crashes and churn is not necessarily a hotly debated topic — yet. However, the importance of customer experience in finance apps is, and so are the churning rates in industries like ebanking or crypto-exchanges. In this sense, customer journey and app reliability are crucial factors that can give apps an edge in not only a rapidly growing competitive environment but also an ever-evolving tech-stack ecosystem. For example, tracking app behavior across multiple operating systems allows developers to prioritize the maintenance of different app versions and helps the customer success team reach out to impacted users.

Analyzing crash data lets you know the extent of the crash and each of the particularities that may have been involved when applied to individual customers. Perhaps the crash was triggered by an issue with the hardware, in which case the state of the devices’ RAM, disk, battery, or other will come into play. Or perhaps the software was plagued with bugs that affected some operating systems more than others or some app versions.

Bottom line: there are certainly many reasons for a crash, but obviously, the more information you know about it, the faster the diagnosis, the faster the solution, and the happier the customers.

The Review Struggle

“Finance app should not be buggy,” said a customer in their review of a crypto platform. Sure, not all reviews reporting bugs are necessarily genuine because the perception of ‘what is a bug’ may rely on the level of savviness of the customers, network connectivity issues, and many more factors. Nonetheless, a review is a review, and for an up-and-coming app, it may mean the difference between success and failure.

Discerning which bugs or crashes are relevant and prioritizing them is almost as important as solving the problems themselves. And there are multiple sources of information about them and their corresponding impact, including aggregating websites, social media, and specialized media. Even though churn will not be automatic upon the first crash in a finance app, it will surely deter the customer from continuing to do business and start looking for other options. Remember, the higher the perception that money was lost because of an engineering problem, the higher the likelihood of a bad review.

Strategizing for Crash Mitigation

Knowledge is power, so the more you know about the crash, the more you can reduce the chances of client attrition, especially after you have dedicated resources to onboard and nurture them.

However, bugs and crashes are almost impossible to avoid. Murphy’s law applies in full force here: something will go wrong at some step of the development process. Any app’s ideal is to remediate the damage as soon as possible, so there is as little disruption in the customer journey as possible. So, when things go wrong, you must have a retention strategy to minimize churn.

The ability to granularly scan the impact of the crash is the single best thing you need from your analytics solution. Upon knowing the context of the crash, having the solution ready, and grasping the extent of your customer base affected, you must reach out to them — because the missed opportunity of mitigating something the customer will perceive as an error will set in motion the dissatisfaction that will lead to a churning client.

Once you single out the customers impacted, get the feedback you need to know what they think about you and to make them feel appreciated:

• Send push messages to make sure the crash’s negative impact is reverted as soon as possible with a positive message.
• Create a cohort with users that were affected by a certain number of crashes and that also have other properties, such as device, country, or average level of engagement, and send them a survey to gather their thoughts.
• Track your NPS® score before and after crashes in the particular cohorts affected.

Finding the Fix

Crash data analysis has unlimited power when you can combine it with what you know about your users and when you have the ability to integrate crashes into your retention strategy or even your Voice of the Customer program. You need to get customers to understand that, yes, a crash occurred but your product is always working towards greatness and this minor setback will not continue to affect them. Contact us to walk you through a demo of how easy this process is.

Fixing problems should not be a problem in itself when you know for a fact that your customers will stay with you no matter what. Because at the end of the day, fewer complaints from crashes will give you that low churn rate your app and your business need.