Your Password (Or Passcode)
That is the dilemma that got me into a 2 hours standoff with my bank because I couldn’t log in anymore. It all started from a misunderstanding of what information should I fill in the password input.
When I first created my account I used the “Continue with Apple” option in order to avoid using a password. But any bank apps I have used so far they also require you to create a password which you can later protect behind a FingerPrint of FaceID check. A very common way of doing authentication nowadays.
Because the process of creating your account involves a lot more than your email, a password and some built-in feature for authenticating yourself. It also involves making use you are writing your address well, you provide the correct photos for the “Know Your Customer” process, that you give details about the source of the money, that you are choosing the right plan and many other steps that banks require you to fill in before finally submitting your account for approval.
To make things worse, in between those steps all kind of relevant information and legal required walls of texts are presented to you. Stuff like “remember this relevant piece of information”, “here is a list of never ending terms that you must accept”, “here are other financial packages that might interest you” are common things to be prompted with when you are creating your account.
Back to my standoff, I’m sure that in between all the steps and prompts and modals I went through when creating my account there was one of them explaining how the password for the mobile app is actually the passcode even if the account was created with a “Continue with X” kind of authentication.
The wording on the login page asked for a password and I didn’t had one, I tried to “Reset my password”; a process that I could initiate but could not finish because of “Something went wrong” kind of message. I assume that I tried to access a path that I was not supposed to, one that the software team most surely said “This scenario ain’t gonna happen”. Well it happened.
As I couldn’t reset my non existing password I had to contact support to which I had to give 100% matching information about a lot of the things I filled in when creating my account. And guess what happened? It didn’t match because you can’t match it 100% so they had to escalate it and ask more questions. After two hours of back and forth, their support team had the idea to try to fill in the password input with the password label with a big fat title page of “Enter Password” using the passcode. And it worked!
Yes, yes, yes, you have to pay attention when dealing with such delicate information like your back account, and you should keep a copy of all the information filled in a file protected by a password and store that in a secure storage and take many other precautions to safely store your information.
But you can also expect your banking app to write “Enter your password or passcode” at the login page and avoid wasting 2 hours of your time and their support time. 2 hours of what happens if I can’t easily recover my account, what about my money, what about all the transaction records. 2 hours of anxiety that can be easily avoided.
You can’t expect and neither rely on your customers to remember all the information you presented them when they were going through a complex process filled with many details and it is much easier to give a hint or add a few words that would avoid many headaches for both the company and the customer.
At the same time, it is very hard to get one time processes like on-boardings or password resets right the first time. Even if you use your own app daily which helps to refine and polish the most used features, you will have blind spots in those areas that are one time only. And even you try to put yourself in the situation of a new customer and go through the process, your brain already has plenty of information to support you and associates concepts that a new customer will never do.
That’s why collecting customer feedback when such issues like mine happens is critical to improve these one time processes. Document these situations with as much detail as possible and make them part of your testing process.