Using mobile apps and websites for banking, insurance, personal finance and investment in India can be deeply frustrating.
These are essential services and companies providing these services must invest in the right kind of design expertise to provide superior digital product experiences to their customers. UX, or in this context, CX (Customer Experience) is critical enough to not only create core product differentiation but also, directly impact the company’s bottom line. Remember, good customer experience is good business. Gone are the days of unflinching customer loyalty — especially with the younger generation of internet users or Millennials, as we call them — who are digital natives. If their online experience of your product or service is sub-par, they will simply move on to the next best provider.
“When interfaces fail to live up to those unrealistic standards of simplicity, Millennials rarely blame themselves — unlike older users. Millennials are quick to criticise the interface, its organisation, or its designers”
and that attitude is rubbing on to older folks like me! I recently moved my mutual fund investments from Scripbox to Goalwise simply because Goalwise — at least for me, provides a much easier, frictionless and pleasant app experience as compared to Scripbox. Don’t get me wrong, both platforms are equally good for their level and quality of service, expertise etc. Functionally, they are at par. The clincher for me was the overall user experience and the subtle joy of using a “modern” app that not only looked contemporary but also behaved fast, and was frictionless and smooth, as I managed my monthly investment tasks.
Scripbox
Apps should have a singular focus. Scripbox lands me on a blank page once I log in with nothing except the green button to go to the Investment Account. Erm, why not land me on the Investment Account as soon as I log in? Once you are on the Investment Account page, the overflow menu in the bottom right has a sundry list of options from Profile to…but wait, where’s Logout. I find that to be the most confusing thing — once you are inside Investment Account, and after you are done with whatever you were there to do, you want to log out. But you can’t find the Logout option. It took me a while to figure out that you have to go to Home to log out.
Goalwise
Clean, contemporary and fun design. Logging in, you land on your investment dashboard by default — clear focus. A single global navigation menu including My account as the first menu option, Logout as the last option and everything else in between. And this doesn’t change. Whether one should use hamburger menus is a topic for another post, the classic Hub and Spoke navigation works. Most importantly, super easy to set up a goal, start a SIP and get on with the task of putting something back for a rainy day!
Time to raise the standards of customer experience
Even before the government launched the Digital India campaign in 2015, customers were already adopting online banking services in droves. Ever since the concerted efforts from the Reserve Bank of India to promote retail electronic payments and the setting up of the National Payments Corporation (NPCI) in 2009, banks have done a fantastic job of bringing these innovations to their customers. Considering the scale and reach banks in India have — both urban and rural, this was truly commendable. From providing basic access to bank statements to enabling online fund transfers to introducing UPI and digital wallets, we have come a long way. But while functionally robust, most of the time the quality of experience of online banking services differ significantly from each other and customers face inconsistencies from one app to the other as they perform common tasks.
Younger customers don’t grin and bear anymore. They don’t wait until they reach the threshold of frustration to eventually abandon the app/website. Factors like the lack of clarity of information presented, ease of navigation, and visual sophistication , are all valid reasons for the discerning young adult to quickly look for a better alternative.
So, what better way to make customers stick around than to reduce the artificial differences between different banking apps? If the user tasks don’t change much, why should each app offer a different CX to accomplish the same task — say, for instance, fund transfer?
Both ICICI and SBI apps present a core personal banking service like fund transfer in drastically different ways when the task flow essentially is the same.
Whether to complete a purchase on an e-commerce site or book a flight or pay your electricity bill online, customers had to learn new interfaces earlier to essentially do the same thing — to select a payment method and complete the transaction. In the last couple of years, a positive change seems to have occurred in the way payment gateways are standardising the UI. The payment gateway options are now a consistent pattern across different merchants with established test protocols.
More of the above needs to happen so that standard UI patterns are developed and published for frequent banking tasks like fund transfers or other critical transactions like insurance claims, initiating KYC procedures, loan applications, setting up a mutual fund SIP etc.
The right kind of design expertise
Banks and retail financial institutions simply have to wake up to the fact that the quality of customer experience of your online services is critically important to customer retention. You will do well to,
1. Distinguish between marketing activities and product development activities
Very often the same department does both, which in itself is not an issue. The issue is a lack of awareness about the specific skill sets and processes required to build products which are not the same as running marketing campaigns. Creative ad agencies are best equipped to run your ad campaigns, even launch your “online presence”. They may not be the best option to also build your apps and websites unless they know what they are getting into. A mindset shift is required to treat product design and development as a distinct activity from advertising and marketing. For sure, let marketing have a say in creating a distinct experience through the right content, branding and style. But leave structure, navigation, interaction design and UX writing to product designers who are well-versed in using the iterative design process — understanding the problem statement or opportunity, diverging and testing hypotheses with real customers, and then converging on using established, contemporary UX patterns, visual design, fit and finish of the final design solution. Truly innovating where required and not re-inventing the wheel each time they build a feature.
2. Invest exclusively in design research, UX design and product development
Either through an in-house product design and development team or finding the right UX design agency to build your apps and websites. UX researchers and product designers bring craft and powerful design thinking skills to build differentiated customer experiences. They tap into known design conventions and a well-established UX process so that customers get a consistent experience as they traverse a whole ecosystem of apps on a day-to-day basis.
3. Build or hire the right team and get the hell out of the way!
Banking departments that procure the services of designers and developers need to provide autonomy and allow teams to work independently so that they deliver their best work. Often, interference from leadership and subjective opinions get in the way of what’s right for customers. This is true in non-banking organisations as well. Empower teams, and step aside.
4. Learn from the leaner, agile, innovative smaller companies
Today, tech start-ups generally lead the way in setting the benchmark for the best customer experiences. Keeping an eye on the new kid on the block may help you gauge where you stand in terms of competition and what’s brewing in the world of contemporary, meaningful and thoughtfully crafted customer experiences.
It’s not really that tough. Banks have the resources and are inherently customer-centric. All they need are the right leaders within the organisation to champion modern, sensible customer experiences and give customers what they deserve. You can do it!