Although I have had similar experiences where I’ve needed to over-explain to U.K. suppprt to get them to understand me, so it can happen with domestic support too!
Once I was trying to activate Apple Pay on my MacBook Pro for a TSB credit card. Annoyingly, this required calling TSB to activate (no other way to do it). I called TSB’s own Apple Pay line and had to explain to somebody that it was a Mastercard. They thought all TSB cards were Visa. I said: debit cards are yes, this is a credit card.
I’m sure that does happen, though I do believe it would be less common for UK based support.
Asides from that, I think it is a good thing to provide employment in the domestic market where people will broadly be paid better. I would prefer that over cheaper, overseas support where they are so distant and removed from the market they are trying to assist.
b) those in favour of Brexit due to various statements by its CEO, both before and after the referendum - and threatened to move their operations out of the UK several times.
To be fair a lot of banking institutions said they might have to. It was, at the time (and still may be) an inevitability so I wouldn’t use the term “threat”, as it would be a business decision ultimately.
It was never an inevitability and, without getting in to the politics of it, they shouldn’t have presented it as a likely possibility at a time when future requirements were very much unknown.
It should have been presented as a worst-case scenario, which is realistically what it is.
I agree with you that it’s all ultimately a business decision about how to operate in whatever regulatory environment the market finds itself in.
Also irritates me that people use the App Store reviews to review the bank itself and not the app, e.g. rating the app 1 star because they were turned down for an account.
It’s a pretty fine line, though, sometimes about what’s app and what’s product.
It seems wrong to limit to technical prowess, but as soon as you get into content or usability you’re into process and workflow - and product.
I get the sentiment but I think it’s a really difficult distinction to make. And ultimately unhelpful? If I bank with First Direct I kinda want to know whether it’s a good bank rather than whether it’s run by fraudsters with a brilliantly designed and highly performant app…
This is the trouble, as the way everybody uses their account and accesses their account is so different. The whole thing becomes inherently subjective.
That’s why I really want to know whether a bank (or other app, really) has certain features or not. The review can then help me decide if it’s for me. Clearly I also want to know if other people think it’s generally good or not, but that only goes so far. When that’s the entire focus of the review usefulness is limited.
My comment was that it’s practically impossible, imo, for everyone to have the same view about what is a review for an “app” and what is a review for the product that the app supports. As you elegantly point out, folk never have the same starting place so these things are subjective anyway.
There’s a bigger issue here about thinking of apps and “digital” as a channel rather than a wholesale different way of doing business. But that’s for another thread - and it’s late and I’m tired!
However, every way of interacting with a bank or any business is through some channel or another, so it’s sensible to carve up those interactions and study them separately from the business point of view.
What I’m really trying to say is that if the app experience, specifically, is important to me then I will want to try to find out about it probably through app reviews. If the reviews there are all “general” in nature and not very specific to the app it is not very helpful.
Equally, if branch access is my primary concern, then I’d be looking at branch locators to see if the bank I was considering had a branch nearby or not.
