On February 12th, TD Bank upgraded to a new system for online banking. Directly thereafter, the system became unusable for their customers, who were locked out of their accounts completely. The system remained essentially “down”… for a week. A week! As far as online systems go, that’s an eternity. I’m not sure if they were installing a whole new system or just upgrading the existing system, but, either way, this was a total disaster.
As an entrepreneur who has built online banking systems, I understand the complexity of today’s virtual branch environment. There are many interfaces to third party systems and, despite all of the testing that occurs, there are always bugs. Most of the time, these bugs are a nuisance but do not stop the application’s primary function. But in TD Bank’s case, not only did the whole system go down, they were also seemingly unable to get the system restored.
Imagine your online banking system being unavailable for an hour. If you didn’t attempt access during that hour, you wouldn’t even know it occurred. How about for a full day? There’s a chance that half of the online users wouldn’t access it on that day. Now consider a week. It’s a good bet that nearly every online user would attempt to access it during a whole week. For TD Bank, that’s hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Since many people across all demographics are now used to the virtual branch as their primary method of interacting with their financial institution, this is the equivalent of shutting down the bank for a week. People were understandably mad, and the Twitter firestorm that followed was understandable. Here’s the thing, I have said for years that good self-service trumps great personal service. But I define “good” as comprehensive, user-friendly, secure, and available virtually 24/7. As long as those four conditions exist, the virtual branch will thrive.
Somewhere in your operation, there is a system that is now mission-critical to your customers, and you periodically have to upgrade it. How confident are you that you can avoid a failure similar to TD Bank’s, and ensure that your critical system is available when your customers need it? What is your backup plan? And the backup plan to the backup plan? Failing to spend time on how you will address a critical system failure may have a devastating impact on your ability to thrill and delight current (and future) customers.