Mobile App User Experience / UX Is The Next Battleground For Customer Acquisition & Retention In Kenya’s Fiercely Competitive Banking Industry.
Banking, or the act of banking has been one of the banes of human existence for the better part of a century. In Kenya, no less, for us of the ‘GenX’ collective and older, who remember the world before the Internet, can recall with painful nostalgia how arduous banking used to be back in the day.
There was a time, even before ATMs, that if you wanted to execute a banking transaction you would have to go physically to the branch where your account was domiciled to do it after standing in a queue, for hours sometimes. This was well before the days when wide area networks or ‘WANS’ made it possible to do ‘branchless banking’ which we take for granted these days. Tumetoka mbali! (We have come from far..) True. Story. Younglings.
Fast forward to 2024 and everything we do in life, and work, happens on our smartphones, and no less via mobile apps. The majority of us rarely visit a bank branch unless we need to get a new cheque book, debit or credit cards, or something has gone seriously wrong and/or needs us to be physically present at a bank. This still happens but seemingly less so as banks continue to digitally transform all their operations across the board.
Therefore, the reality is that for most of us, in Kenya and beyond, almost all of our banking experience is channeled via mobile apps and in some cases via USSD. This, coupled with the fact that mobile money, ala Safaricom’s M-Pesa, has become the main medium for banking related transactions and you have a society that takes digital banking as we know it for granted.
Kenya, in particular, eats, lives, and breathes M-Pesa for the majority of their personal and business transactions. Our bank accounts therefore quite often act as a ‘reservoir’ of sorts for the transactions, in and out of our M-Pesa wallets. As Safaricom’s former CEO Michael Joseph once quipped, with great controversial repercussions, ‘Kenyans are peculiar’.
The truth is Kenyans are actually peculiar in the manner in which they quickly adopt and wield all things digital which underpins our global reputation as one of Africa’s leading technology epicentres, also known popularly as the ‘Silicon Savannah’. Lakini, kwa ground, vitu ni different, ama? (but, on the ground however, things are different, or?).
Let me explain. In the area of banking, or more specifically mobile banking apps, my sense is that there is so much room for innovation and improvement from a customer-centric perspective as far as the user experience or ‘UX’ is concerned.
The ‘trigger’ behind this post was my somewhat horrid and quite perplexing experience trying to execute what should have been a relatively straightforward banking transaction on the mobile app. I, a self confessed technophile of sorts, had to even call customer service to find out exactly how this should be done and at the end of the process could not seem to get it to work. Niseme tena, kwa ground, vitu ni different! (Let me say it again, on the ground, things are different!).
So, what is one to do? I remembered I had another bank account that I signed up for a few months ago to do a review but had never used it yet for any reasont. I then gave it a go via their mobile app and even though there seemed to be lots of latency between one screen and the next, it worked. This was NOT a smooth and slick experience either but at least it worked. Job. Done!
In the world of user experience or UX which is something I have been involved in a myriad of work roles at various organizations including my digital agency, Dotsavvy, for over for close to three decades, we often say that famous phrase, ‘don’t make me think’. A good mobile banking app UX should be intuitive and easy to use — you should not spend you time ‘figuring things out’. In fact, another famous phrase in UX parlance is, ‘its not just how it looks, its how it works, and how it leaves you feeling’. Yes, UX can be ‘touchy feely’ too.
UX is not just about eye candy in making an app that looks gorgeous and ‘tasty’. UX, in the context of a mobile banking app, is like any other customer touch point. Its an end-to-end thing that should have zero if not nearly zero friction for the customer. Does the app take many clicks or taps to get something done via the app? Is it easy to understand what the menu items and icons mean? Do screens transition smoothly and quickly or are you left tapping, and tapping again, to get things going? Do you get notifications such as one time passwords or ‘OTPs’ quickly?
All these things add up to either a great or poor customer experience that can either retain or lose customers. Digital consumers, by the way, are a fickle lot when switching costs are nearly zero. Just ask GenZers in Kenya who lead by all metrics when it comes to digital adoption and fluency. Heck, just look at what GenZers have done to Kenya’s political landscape in recent weeks that have caused the hitherto immovable status quo using digital platforms to shift irrevocably. The kids can teach us a thing or two when it comes to how digital things should work from a UX perspective.
All the above being said, kudos to Kenyans and our banks for innovating as much as they have in building mobile banking apps that allow us to execute a broad range of tasks and use cases around our deep affinity for all things mobile and digital in nearly every conceivable context.
However, my experience yesterday suggests there is still lots of room for improvement and the banks that get this right with an increasingly digital-first Kenyan consumer market will win customers for life. Indeed, there is no such thing as a mature market these days and this applies to banking which has become not a place you go to, but a digital thing you do, more than ever.
Going forward, the million shilling question has become, ‘do we actually need banks or do we just need banking services irrespective of who provides them?’ Think about that for a second and you will realise that the whole mobile banking app UX conundrum is ripe for digital disruption!
