A rudimentary search of the terms Westpac Online Banking will quickly result in the ignoble documentation regarding the rather significant, but unfortunately repetitive, online banking outages experienced by Westpac and affecting large numbers of its customers. In one case the air-con seemed to be to blame.
Problems happen, sure. Unexpected difficulties are to be handled quickly, with instrumentation set in place to handle such a problem in the future to prevent such a recurrence from happening again. Problems are not necessarily symbolic of incompetence, but they are certainly indicative of systems that need to be improved.
And in the case of online banking, it is likely that even the smallest problems will thoroughly outrage the clientele of any business to the point of near ferocity. Small issues become enormously irritating, especially in the case of financial necessity, when bills need to be paid or other payments need to be issued in a timely fashion. It’s not just a nuisance in this case; it can often be a very significant fiscal problem, for a great number of people.
Amazon conducted an interesting study of how slow server speed adversely affects business and sales, finding that, even down to the millisecond, millions of dollars could be lost simply by having almost unnoticeably slow load times. Customers get distracted easily, and business is lost.
In the case of banks, the situation is altogether different; payments need to go through, which means impulse buys are largely a non-issue; but the fact of the matter remains that even the tiniest speed glitch, or, in the case of these Westpac failures, far more significant problems, can drive business away. While far more difficult to leave a bank on a whim (unlike online business, which can be moved to a different online store quite easily), it is nevertheless to be regarded as a rather serious problem which will have significant long-term consequences. Rival businesses could easily seduce a number of clients to their side, merely with the lightly condescending advertising campaign of our air-con keeps us cool, not frozen in our tracks.
One cannot help but wonder how online banking can go down on such a frequent basis, when businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Google and others seem to be flawlessly operational at all hours of the day. Clearly this is not a matter of coincidence. Westpac and other banks can get defensive all day long about problems occurring unexpectedly, failures being impossible to anticipate, and so on; but at the point that other businesses in fact do far more business online, and without fail, the conclusion can only be drawn unfavorably toward business whose online systems fail repeatedly.
Money is at stake, and probably quite a lot of it. With the proliferation of online-only banks, and the future developments of NFC communications and mobile phone payment accounts, banks have a long way to go in ensuring customers they remain relevant, at least in the broad consumer market. Failures like this need to become a thing of the past; and, as any good business leader knows, these customers should be compensated as an offer of good will. Bribes go a long way.
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