What not to do
A small warning before we get going this week - this post is going to feature some fairly detailed discussion about online banking. Please don’t go to sleep or start playing Wordle just yet - there is a less finance specific point coming.
For those of us who have some engagement with authorising bank payments at work, and whose companies bank with a place called CAF Bank, the last ten days have been interesting at best and a complete nightmare at worst. On Monday 9 June, CAF Bank was meant to be moving over into some kind of new system. My profound lack of technical knowledge prevents me from giving much more detail here - suffice to say, their online banking portal was going to look different, and everyone needed new login details to get into it.
So they sent out said login details the week before and sent a message to everyone with a user account to flag that this was happening and we all filed it somewhere in our inbox and got on with our lives. And then, on Monday 9 June, when the shiny new system was meant to be up and running, chaos ensued.
For reasons I, and possibly CAF Bank, don’t understand, something went terribly wrong with the migration and many many many people couldn’t access the new system. Now this is irritating if, say, you’re trying to buy something from an online retailer and their website can’t handle online orders for a brief period (thoughts & prayers with M&S). But if this is your actual banking system, the thing that you use to do one of the major things that any company needs to do - pay people - then this is a huge problem.
I’m able to remain slightly light-hearted about all this, thanks to the fact that, as it happened, we had no hugely pressing payments to authorise last week and, most importantly, no payroll to run. But for many organisations, this wouldn’t have been the case. Imagine, if you will, that you needed to pay twenty (or fifty, or a hundred) employees on, say, the 12 June, a contractually agreed date where payment should arrive in their bank account to enable them to do things like pay their rent / mortgage and buy food. And then the primary tool that you need to fulfil this obligation overnight becomes entirely inaccessible through no fault of your own and, when you phone up for help, you’re faced with two to three hour phone queues where, even if you manage to stick it out until you reach an actual human, they might not be able to get you into the system anyway.
It was, in short, a complete disaster for CAF Bank. They were unable to provide their primary service to their customers and caused a huge amount of stress to both the individuals who were trying to make payments and people who needed to be paid but didn’t get their money on time because their organisations literally couldn’t do it. And, on top of this, they also handled it fairly terribly. They put some updates on their website about what was happening, but only updated it every couple of days, which is a long time in circumstances such as these. The CEO sent out an email apologising at the end of the week - which I’d suggest is too little too late in this scenario. And the phone system was clearly completely ill equipped to deal with the number of calls they were receiving - I needed to call them to regain online access (after it inexplicably stopped working mid payment authorisation) and, the first couple of times that I called, there was simply a message saying ‘our phone lines are overwhelmed, call back later’, which I’d suggest is less than satisfactory.
The test of leadership is not how you act in the good times but what you do when things go wrong - in this case, spectacularly and publicly wrong. When something like this happens to another company, alongside a dollop of smug schadenfreude, I like to try and work out how I might have handled it differently - after all, it’s very easy to complain that everything’s terrible when you’re not dealing with a major IT meltdown and have a hoard of angry customers metaphorically banging down the door.
And the main thing, for me, that stuck out as a poor handling of a rubbish situation was the communication. If you have a major issue that affects a lot of people, sending an email around with an apology five days after it happens is, to my mind, not good enough. If I were running CAF Bank, I’d have wanted a message to go out to all customers at the end of the first day, apologising for this almighty muck up, giving some explanation for why it happened and, most importantly, laying out what was being done to fix it. Then, I reckon it’s best to keep communicating until the issue is resolved - update the messaging on your website constantly, keep your social media up to date, have another email from the CEO a few days later - in essence, make people feel that you care about what’s happening. For all I know, CAF Bank could really have thrown the kitchen sink at fixing this issue - but if you don’t let your customers know how hard you’re working to resolve the situation and how much you care about the impact it’s having on them, you can say goodbye to any kind of goodwill or benefit of the doubt you might have been given.
This was only exacerbated by the issue with the phone lines. To call up, probably in a mild panic because you’ve got to pay some people imminently and you can’t access the banking system, and then receive a message that simply says ‘we’ve got too many calls, we can’t talk to you right now, try again later’ is completely infuriating. To not even have the option to sit on hold for two hours?! That’s obviously a terrible option, but at least you know that you’ve got a shot at talking to someone eventually. And also, it puts the problem back into your court. We’ve reached our capacity, so you find another time in your schedule to call us - despite the fact that we were the ones who screwed up. Not a good look.
When I finally did get through to someone on the phone, she was delightful and fixed my login problems incredibly quickly - but I can only imagine some of the customer ire she’d have had to deal with throughout the day. The leadership lesson in all of this, for me, is transparency. When there’s a crisis, people on the receiving end of it feel powerless and, understandably, have many questions they want answered: how on earth could this have happened? When will it be fixed? How will you make sure it never ever happens again?
So the solution is to show your workings. Over communicate. What progress have we made today? What knowledge can we share about how to fix common issues? What are we doing tomorrow to accelerate resolution? And, when the dust has settled, share what you’ve learned, what new measures will be in place to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, and how you’re going to earn trust back from your customers or community.
Being 100% transparent all of the time in leadership is not always possible. But when a crisis hits, it seems to me that the more you can share, the better - by letting people glimpse behind the curtain, rather than leaving them out in the cold, you let them know exactly how hard you’re working to fix things, and make them feel like the problems you’ve caused them really matter to you. As they say, shit happens, but that doesn’t mean that you have to provide a shitty response - on the contrary, how you choose to tackle the fallout has the potential to make your customers or your community feel even more connected to you and become stronger allies rather than disgruntled enemies.