A most customer-unfriendly online banking systemThe management of our major banks are busy patting themselves on the back for achieving conversion of numbers of customers to online banking, limiting any deposits made “manually” to $10,000+ (so, what about all the smaller deposits?), reducing crowds in banks and thus being “Covid-responsible”.
There is, however, another side to the story. When RBC converted to electronic banking and started reducing customer walk-in service, they were the most hated bank in town, according to the many complaints I have heard. Maybe they listened to complaints and made things smoother—I don’t bank with RBC, so I don’t know.
Republic Bank, however, is in a class by itself with what has to be the most customer-unfriendly system ever programmed.
It is a nightmare of inadequate menus with unfamiliar terms, very slow responses, short duration before time-outs, multiple logins always required, difficulty in obtaining a paper record of what one just did, etc, etc.
I have found that no-one in management is interested in listening to customer complaints, so how can we expect them to improve?
Examples are:
1. When opening the site, why not immediately show as many of the transactions in the account as possible, with an obvious scroll down for earlier ones. In other words, open with the statement. Most people want to see if a payment has been made or received and the balance, so why go through several (incomprehensible) menu options for this?
2. Why do we have to go to “Transactions” for anything we want to know, because we aren’t sure what “Transactions” means.
3. When making a payment, we would like to send a message to the payee, saying who from and what for. Maybe “Invoice Number” or something similar. This cannot be done with any confidence on the online screen. There is a section for “Remarks” or something, but nowhere does it say “THIS WILL BE SHOWN WITH YOUR PAYMENT”, so nine times out of ten, the payee has to deduce by remote sensing, make telephone enquiries, etc.
4. When you have several things to do, why does the thing constantly time out while you wait for the next menu option to come up?
5. When logging in, a little wheel whizzing round and round indicates that it’s moving to the next part of the process (hell of a long wait). Once you have logged in, the little wheel disappears so you don’t know if “the system” has just gone to sleep, or is actually moving you to the next menu option (more long waits). Usually it times out, so one has to start again!
6. If I decide to look up a previous payment and when it’s on screen, decide to print it out as evidence, it prints like a “transaction” just made on today’s date. That’s very worrying because you made the payment last week—so, has it made the payment again? Why not come clean and show the date of payment?
There are many more complaints, but basically it is a non-intuitive menu system that needs a lot of improvement and it’s ridiculously slow. Of course, one can always go to the ATM, get cash, and try to conduct all business in cash—except that in the case of the Glencoe branch, the machine is frequently empty or won’t print a receipt that day!
And, of course, the bank claims it is not responsible for ATMs—that’s some other company’s responsibility!
Recently we have heard that Republic is majority Government-owned, but after all that should not mean our flagship bank has to operate like a section of Government.
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