ABSA's truly horrific UX.

I despair of ABSA ever learning about decent UX ( user experience ). ABSA does not understand that UX touches everything that touches the client. I have 2 examples of just how bad ABSA's UX is.

Let say one has a debit against one's credit card that comes in every month at more or less the same time and let's say one has forgotten about this debit and has not left sufficient credit in the credit card to actually cover this debit and let's say one has more than one debit of this nature going off against one's credit card every month. Now when the debit is pushed against one's credit card and there are insufficient funds to cover the debit one would expect to get some sort of intelligible message from ABSA to let you know the debit bounced, so what does ABSA do, they give you this message

"Absa: You have insufficient funds to make this purchase using credit card ending in *****X. A fee may be charged for declined transactions. Check if you qualify for a credit limit increase via the Banking App or Absa Online. T&C apply. Auth FSP/NCRCP7".

Can you see the inanity of this message ? All it does is advertise for ABSA. It does not tell one who is originating the charge, it does not tell one the amount of the charge, it does not tell one the date and time of the charge, in effect it tells one absolutely NOTHING about the debit, so one has no way of knowing which debit it was, no way of knowing the source of the debit, no way of knowing the amount of the debit, in effect this SMS tells one absolutely nothing about anything and so it does not assist one in getting to the bottom of the problem or in fixing it. This is what I mean when I talk about ABSA having atrocious UX.

I have another example also from the murky world of ABSA's credit cards. Bear in mind I'm terribly absent minded, I'd forget my head if it wasn't *****ed on correctly, I also can not remember all the charges that go off against my credit card every month because they are scattered all over the month so the way I handle this is, if I see my credit card has gone in debit, then I immediately top it up so that it's not in debit. This was a strategy that has worked perfectly for every bank I have ever used EXCEPT for ABSA. If one has a budget amount on one's credit card one is expected to make a monthly payment against that amount and the monthly payment is "deducted" from one's credit card balance. Now when one uses the ABSA banking app one sees one's credit card balance immediately after one logs in, now as I mentioned earlier if I log in and I see my balance is negative I immediately top it up to make it positive, EXCEPT this does not work on ABSA's banking app because the balance that the app displays for one's credit card in no way bears any resemblance to one's actual balance which can be quite different. I had a lady phone me this morning to ***** at me because I needed to pay another R1,600 to square the balance on my credit card because my monthly budget debit had gone through EXCEPT just this morning I had noticed I was over on my credit card so I topped it up to make the figure positive not negative. One would think this would be sufficient but NO ABSA does not believe it's appropriate to show the ACTUAL CORRECT figure on their banking app, they expect one to constantly refer to one's statement so one can know what's going on in one's account. I don't understand the logic, statements come out once a month, the banking app people look at every day, so surely in terms of good UX their banking app should display the correct up-to-date figure for one's credit card not some arbitrary figure that is not actually related to the state of the card. ABSA also shows the same arrogance as all the banks, they do not understand what I am going on about when I complain about their UX, about making things easier for the customer, they just arrogantly tell me to shut up and go read my statement.

These are just 2 examples of absolutely atrocious UX that can be found when one banks with ABSA. I could easily show you another 25 examples of their awful UX but it would not do any good, I have emailed ABSA about a number of their UX issues but they just ignore me, they don't even have the courtesy to respond to my emails, I only get bland and meaningless automated responses. ABSA's UX truly sucks beach ***** through hosepipes almost as much as their service.