"Secure Chat", The 1000-Clicks App from FNB

I've been with FNB since I was 6 and my parents opened my first bank account with them. FNB has always been on the forefront of innovation. They have built a very sought after eco system of banking related features. Their online banking is one of the best in class. But this past year was the first time I've started to feel like FNB has now grown to a size that they can't maintain.

In the early days getting in touch with FNB was easy. You opened your online banking site, log in, and clicked the very easy to find "help" link. You can then enter a message and select if it is a complaint or query, and you are done. Someone will then respond on your message with an email, and you can submit any information or forms required.

Today FNB has removed all forms of communications from their website, good luck to find a phone number or email address you can contact. If you don't know or have saved any contact details you are lost. If you try to find it on their website you can't get it, if you find something it's "call me back" links.

I realise that some people can only make phone calls, grown up when you can only visit a branch in person, and got excited when they realised, they can make a long distance phone call using POTS. But you know they are dying by the day; I don't think many of that generations are still alive.

Since those times the world has sped up. You can now communicate and have meetings in the same day with 100 of contacts. We call this magic: Online Meeting, Instant Messaging and Email, yes Email. FNB has slowly started to forget that that medium does exist.

Now if you need help with FNB, you have to either walk into a branch, this is really the only way to get good service, as the rest of FNB's empire of support consist of Agents that only really know how to transfer you to another irrelevant department.

Your other options if you know the numbers are to call them, you will however spend more than an hour being transferred between departments, and repeating yourself over and over. And if you don't want to do something stupid like "open another account, or request a statement" you will most likely end your hour of conversation not being helped by anyone. It seems like no one is left that can find out what is going on and inform you.

Lastly if you don't have the time to sit on the phone for hours, you can use their "Secure Chat" also known as the "the most unusable chat app on the planet". The experience is simple you get transferred between departments like crazy, sometimes you don't even get a reply you just get transferred. You still have to explain your query all over again, every time. Oh, and don't think that you can "copy and paste" your previous messages, you have to type them over and over letter by letter, because the app doesn't support copy and paste.

While you wait for responses, and you phone screen sleeps, you have to perform 1000 clicks to get back to the Secure Chat, then to spice things up, when you reply, the app will jump 100 paces up, so that you have to scroll down every time to view the last message. When the Agent replies, the message is cleverly hidden under your onscreen keyboard, so that you can't see it. And then when you try to do any other work in-between, you WILL lose your session with this agent. It does not matter if you are waiting for the agent to reply, your chat will close with "no responses received from you".

When you write messages, the onscreen keyboard will close after every send, so when you have to explain lengthy situation, you have to tap the textbox after every message and wait for the onscreen keyboard to open.

I would love to challenge FNB to switch off their email between colleagues and expect them to just use the Secure Chat option. Let them sit and type lengthy meeting minutes and long explanations using their tiny phones. Also, with the added perks of this strange behaviour. If they need to send a document as proof to a colleague they have to print it and take it to the other employee (it's like going into a branch), because you know it: The app doesn't support uploading photos or documents! Also, when they are in conversation with multiple colleagues all of their chat messages must be in one chat history like the app, all mixed in together, because on Secure Chat, you can't have multiple conversations about multiple queries.

I think the problems with the app will be noticed and sorted out within the hour of this! Really FNB, you can't build a chat app, you are not that smart. It's great that you tried, but you suck at it. So, either use another chat platform, like WhatsApp or Telegram, all are "secure". And they work.

If I had the option, I would have just used another channel to communicate with FNB, I would have ignored the "Secure Chat", I would have been comfortable sending an email to FNB, giving someone on the other end to say "hey we got your mail" and then when they have figured out what the problem is and then only respond with a proper answer. They can also internally send the email all over the place, I would not have cared since I'm not involved in that. I would also be able to send multiple emails for different queries that the same time. And each would take various lengths of time to be answered, since that is how any business works.