Don’t forget the basics

Your product is innovative, the features cause excitement, and it’s also visually appealing? If the basics, however, are insufficient, this can easily kill a good user experience and scare customers away permanently. Here’s what happened to myself.

It was May 2018 – Apple Pay has already been live for four years in the US and had meanwhile also launched in Ireland or Ukraine. Being a customer of German banks and also an Apple aficionado, I was fed up waiting even longer for the ability to pay casually by smartphone and watch.

As my savior, I picked KBC Bank Ireland. I didn’t know them, they charged 2€ per month for the current account, but the website seemed reputable, customer reviews were positive and, most importantly, they would send me a debit card with the account that was compatible with Apple Pay. What could possibly go wrong?

Excitement at first – what could possibly go wrong?

The account was opened surprisingly fast and easy, and even before I held the actual debit card in hands, I was able to add the virtual version of it into my smartphone. Likewise, blocking and re-issuing a card was supposed to be possible directly from KBC’s app. And, as desired: Quick, contactless, secure payments via smartphone worked like a charm and I left chasiers impressed. Everything digital, everything by app, everything great – I was excited.

Until I swapped my phone.

Then I was not able to log into the banking app. Logging in via website also did’t work, as this required authenticating through the app.

The friendly customer service agent told me that the phone exchange was probably the reason for the issue and that I should just try it again a couple of days later – it’d surely work then. Or they could send a temporary PIN code by mail to log into the web portal, but this may easily take one or two weeks. No thank you, this can’t be a real solution either.

Thus, I didn’t have access to my account and the money inside – it wasn’t much, but what if that were my main bank account?

After six weeks and several customer service requests I gave up. I closed the account, frustrated and disappointed.

Too bad, six weeks in I gave up, frustrated and disappointed.

What a shame, I thought, the most innovative and most exciting features are of no use when the basics are not done right. No matter if the use case „customer swaps device and wants to log in from the new device“ – however this may have happened – was forgotten or if it was „just“ a bug in my case: The basic, fundamental functions need to be available and and for „special“ cases there need to be reliable fallback solutions. Even using an old-fashioned TAN list in the meantime would have been totally acceptable for me.

To know that, the bank should have simply asked me. Or other (potential) users [Link zu einer Methodenseite auf unserer Website] and ideally already during the strategy or concept phase of the app development.