Did the ATM eat your card?

How many of you have let the ATM eat your credit/debit card? This is what i mean – You need to get some cash, you are in a hurry, you go to a ATM machine, quickly inserted your card, punched in your PIN, got your money and quickly returned to your car …. Zoooommmm. And later you realize – ‘Jeez, i think i left my card at the ATM machine’. And you go online, find the customer service number, call them, give your details and wait for a new card. (Personally, though i’ve come close to losing my debit card at the ATM, i haven’t really let the ATM eat my card !!!)

Banks are aware that you are in a hurry and they work with the ATM vendors to make the cash checkout as fast as possible. Lets take a specific example, in a bank i go to they have this ‘Fast Cash’ feature, where using minimum key strokes you can get your cash and be on your way. The screen looks like this:

This design has definitely satisfied one need of customers. The customer can get the money fast and zip out. But I am sure this design is causing another problem. It makes more customers to lose their cards. There is a behavioral reason to this. As a customer i go to ATM for a specific reason – I want the money from the ATM. And once that is done, I am mentally disconnected from the machine. Even if I am visually or audibly notified, i may not pay attention.

Last time i went to one ATM of the bank i noticed that they are trying to solve this problem in a simple way. After I enter my card into the machine, before showing the screen where i can draw money, they have inserted a screen asking me to ‘Take the card NOW‘. Here is the screen that they have inserted:

I am not sure how they came with the fix. I can think of couple of reasons. The bank might have analyzed customer service costs and might have been thinking of coming with ways to cut the cost. They might have looked at the money they are spending on card-reissuance. Whatever the reason might be, i think it is a simple, but effective feature to fix some pain points, both of the bank and of the customers. Kudos to the person who came up with this design idea.

Postscript: And then…I went to another ATM of the same bank. The intermediate screen was not showing up there. Then I thought to myself ‘Well they may be doing A/B testing !!!”

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