UPI has emerged as a ubiquitous payment mode for small-ticket transactions, and a variety of new solutions within UPI have been rolled out targeting low-income and low-digital proficiency user groups. To ensure that these advancements result in tangible positive effects on users’ experiences with UPI, it is important to monitor customer grievances and grievance resolution experiences. Data across public and non-public sources indicates that the user experience of grievance redressal is not hassle-free. In this study, we focus on whether consumers use the grievance mechanisms provided in UPI apps in smartphones, and whether those mechanisms make for an easily navigable grievance redress journey ending in satisfactory resolution. Through this three-phased project, we seek to improve the comprehension and effectiveness of in-app grievance redressal experiences in UPI applications – with a focus especially for constrained users who form a significant segment of UPI consumers. In the first phase, we conducted an on-field study to understand how constrained and new-to-UPI user groups interact with the in-app GRMs in UPI applications and to deduce bottlenecks in the user journey through user testing. The following phase leveraged the insights from this fieldwork to create an improved prototype of the grievance redress mechanism for a UPI app. These prototypes were tested on-field with users in the final phase, to understand whether they solved various user concerns and whether any additional changes to the prototypes were required. Besides the prototypes, the report covers user experience guidelines for designing UPI in-app GRMs, a consolidation of the key insights from this project. The GRM Framework for UPI, also placed in this report, can support GRM design and aid in strategic long-term decisioning for it. We believe these, and the Toolkit accompanying this report, will be of value to policymakers, regulators, banks, TPAPs, product tech and design enthusiasts who are trying to design digital interfaces for the billion users.
Read our report and check out the toolkit here.