The Meem app: it sucks
If you’re a “digital only” bank like Meem, the app your customers use is all they see: it’s like a virtual 🏦 branch.
That’s fitting, because you know what my impression of meem is as a user? When I open up their app, it feels like walking into a crowded butcher shop, with soaking wet floors leaving soily footprints amongst the carcasses dripping in blood and a lurking stench of cow excrement surrounded by the constant buzzing of flies swarming overhead. Customer “service” is dispensed from behind a large chopping board with gizzards of meat feeding the hungry flies where your elbows sit.
And judging by the update frequency to the app, it’s safe to assume it’s an outsourced job. The natural follow on question is: who set the requirements? I don’t mean who figuratively. I’d really like to know who that human being is, that evil mastermind that designed so unusable an app; his background, where he grew up and how he devised such a deviously bad app.
Lastly, I’m left flabergasted over one final quandary: does anyone at the bank actually use it? Has no one spoken to the app team to let them know how much needless pain and suffering their app inflicts on its users?
Things that are wrong with the ‘meem’ app
I initially had this as a list of items, but as it got longer I found it necessary to categorize the issues.
Support
There isn’t as much an issue with support as there is with the utter and complete lack of it. Not once have I been able to resolve an issue with the in-chat support directly. The conversation has always, without fail, ended with them requesting that I “contact the call center”.
Since they show no record of previous support cases, I tried opening the app and asking the support agent about the APR on my credit card.
A fairly simple and straightforward request, no?
Well…
Lo and behold, “you must call us please” — followed (of course) by “any thing ells to help?”
It doesn’t matter that you’re travelling, or that you’re already authenticated in the app and don’t want to spend half an hour doing it over the phone: no. Set aside half an hour, call the number, wait in line, hope it doesn’t drop, and pray to God that the issue doesn’t disappear into the abyss without a trace.
And when it’s all said and done, there’s not a shred of written evidence of your conversation with support.
User Experience
I use pretty much all the features Meem makes available — the debit card with multi-currency accounts, the credit card and the Murabaha deposits.
Using the card for payments has one stark difference relative to the experience I’ve had using Monzo: transactions don’t show up instantly.
It’s not even close to instant.
Same day, maybe?
Wrong again. Try 3 days.
Seriously. THREE DAYS! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think meem goes around collecting physical receipts from all the stores before posting them online. It’s 2019 people, get with the times.
Speaking of transactions, their transaction list is unbelievably useless. Because of the way it’s designed, you have to click on the transactions INDIVIDUALLY to find out what the bloody hell you ordered! I mean seriously, take a look:
You don’t need to be an expert to know that there are 3 fields that matter for any transaction: the amount, the date and THE STORE NAME. Only an incurably ———- —— could decide to surface “POS Transaction” and hide the merchant name tucked away in a “transaction detail” page.
Oh, and because every click displays that insufferable blinking meem logo for 10 seconds, you’ll be spending at least an hour staring at it while you figure out what on Earth you’ve actually spent the past month.
And that’s good, because the past month’s transactions is about all you can see. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the folks behind the meem app, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that you don’t need to see any transactions beyond the previous month:
I’ll just leave it at that.
I wrote a follow on post about the best bank in Bahrain. After reading this post, my nomination will shock you. Read it here >