Standard Bank needs a disaster recovery plan

I'm left in awe that a commercial giant like Standard Bank can exhibit such utter incompetence when there's an IT problem.

Evidently as a result of some sort of attack, their Internet Banking service went down yesterday. They claim it was for a very brief period. However, over an 18 hour period (only during office hours) I still got answers from their Internet Banking call centre conceding that there were problems.

Yesterday afternoon I called into Talk Radio 702's Eyewitness News Desk to report the problem and was told they'd look into it but there was only one person at Standard Bank permitted to talk to the media - Erik Larsen - and he 'wasn't always easily available'. Hmm. What's the point in paying him then?

I don't care (as the marketing people have subsequently told me) that the attack affected the bank's 'ability to communicate with its customers'. Never ever, when there's been a problem with either Standard Bank or Vodacom 3G service, has either organisation taken the trouble to SMS or e-mail. Yet they BOTH boast cutting-edge technology capability. Bizarre.

If you try calling the Standard Bank Internet Banking call centre out of office hours in a time of service failure like this, you get a recording telling you what their office hours are. Um, Not helpful.

Here's what I think the difficult-to-reach Mr. Erik Larsen may want to consider:

1. Don't wait for hours to decide that this IT glitch is not a 5 minute fix.

2. You will NOT panic customers by immediately sharing problems. You'll get their understanding, their respect and maybe they can go to a plan B (i.e. into a branch) because they know what's going on because - guess what? - you told them. Gosh, isn't that easy enough?

3. When you have a problem, put extra people on the phones and keep your call centre open longer hours to deal with the crisis. Or is your salary bill and the bottom line the only consideration? Isn't  reputation management on the radar any longer?

4. When you finally do get your part of the problem sorted, brief your call centre properly. I called this morning (Standard are pulling the recording) and got told explicitly 'If you're a Vodacom 3G customer, the problem lies on their side' or words to that effect. But quite blatantly blaming Vodacom. Not fair, much though I can't commend Vodacom service.

5. I wonder if there's actually a document or crisis communications plan lying covered with dust in a filing cabinet at Standard Bank, that was once put together by some PR agency? Get it out, dust it off, update it and implement it the next time things go wrong.

6. Their marketing person (she tried real hard to mollify me) told me today 'We had no means of communicating with our customers'. Huh? I said: What about the media? Radio in particular? How about (when you know it's going to be largely wireless internet customers being denied access), using Social Media like Twitter or facebook to to get the message out there? How come they didn't pick up on all my tweets of frustration?

All in all, a horrible communications and reputation management failure. It should be an embarrassment and of deep concern to Standard Bank's shareholders. If they can't handle something on this scale, I'd hate to see their response to a real crisis. Jaco Maree, the Standard Bank CEO, may want to revisit how his organisation connects (or doesn't) with its stakeholders.

Because I still can't 14:10 29th October '09 (twenty five hours later) get into the Standard Bank website, here's a little screensnatch off Google, of Erik Larsen's contact details. File 'em. You may need 'em.

 

Comments

[Kerry]

I ESPECIALLY love the part where you publish Erik Larsen's details! Well done!

[Darren Smith]

"Pres (sic) Relations"

You'd think that Standard Bank would be able to spell Press!

[Itumeleng Monale]

Good Morning Clive,
Firstly I would like to apologise for the unbelievable frustration we have caused you. We truly regret your experiences yesterday and the day before, which are unfortunately a result of a series of consecutive mishaps – that we acknowledge we played a significant part in.

On Wednesday afternoon, we experienced a firewall failure. The planned response then kicked in, which meant that our ports were shut down, while we transferred service to our back-up production site.
Among the client services impacted were the Standard Bank homepage (which is the gateway to our internet banking) as well as some of our messaging such as One Time Passwords.

While we were bringing up services on our back-up site, customers were unable to access the site between 14:40 and 15:45. From 16:00 all services were reinstated from our side.
Unbeknown to us, Vodacom made some changes with their exchange service providers on Wednesday afternoon, which meant that the routing to some services for Vodacom 3G users was impacted. An example is that our business online banking customers could access our ports correctly from Vodacom 3G, but users wanting to transact on internet banking were mis-routed. This was brought to our attention mid-morning Thursday 29 October and our collective teams from Standard Bank, Vodacom and SAIX sat in conference to get to the bottom of the issue till early afternoon when it was rectified.

It is imperative for us that we not only protect the integrity of our systems and our customers’ information, but also ensure that we keep our users abreast of issues when we are aware of them. Due to the fact that the outage on Wednesday afternoon was unplanned, we could not be proactive in our communication, but we constantly briefed our call centre staff about the latest developments.

I apologise if you were given incorrect information on calling our help desk and we will ensure that we get to any root causes of communication breakdowns in future!

I personally communicated with the media throughout the morning yesterday, including going live on air with John Robbie on 702 just after 8:00, as well as conducting interviews with Moneyweb and ITWeb. It is unclear to us why you would have received the response you did when you called 702 in the afternoon, when they had my contact details from the morning session.

An apology from Standard Bank will also be sent to our user base during the course of today.

Again, we apologise unreservedly for your frustrations. To quote your words, it is indeed an “embarrassment of deep concern”. The management team of Customer Channels commits to use this as a case study of how not to provide service in the future and we will certainly take your suggestions into consideration.

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you have any further issues with our online services
Regards Itumeleng Monale
Director: Self Service Banking
Tel: +27 11 636 6287

[Clive Simpkins]

Gotta give Ms. Itumeleng Monale a 10 for her response. Non defensive, honest, apologetic. The guys are totally pathetic by comparison. All they ever start asking is 'What operating system are you using?' or 'Have you downloaded new software recently?' Implying of course that the fault lies with you, the customer. That's Vodacom's data centre speciality.;-(

I hope Ms. Monale will include her excellent response in the case study of which she speaks. It's a darned good lesson and example for any PR student to follow. Standard Bank should look after her.