To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED...

Barclays outage: was the bank ready enough?

Earlier this week I was contemplating the sheer scale of our dependence on technology. This was prompted by two things. The first was my good friend Ewan MacLeod's LinkedIn post on how ChatGPT fixed his washing machine.

In a two-minute video Ewan articulates brilliantly how the technology helped him fix the problem when he was about to buy a replacement machine.

Almost ten years ago, I was extolling the virtues of buying a washing machine using my mobile phone, so we've come a long way in less than a decade.

More serious is the impact when technology goes wrong - case in point this week is Barclays. Stories like this one will have given the comms team sleepless nights; and social media responses to customers demonstrate the real and lasting damage to a brand of getting the tone wrong.

Perhaps because I'm not a customer, I have a little bit of sympathy for Barclays. The outage was unexpected; it came on a Friday when lots of house completions were due to take place; it was also the end of/start of a month, so direct debits volumes were high. This made for a perfect storm.

Should Barclays have responded better? Of course. Could they have been more prepared? Almost certainly. Do I still feel sympathy for the comms, social media and customer service teams operating in almost impossible circumstances? Absolutely.

No business is going to routinely employ many more people in customer service than it needs - just in case something goes wrong. But companies can prepare for the inevitable crisis and be ready to address it. This is time well spent because - as Barclays found out - once you are in the eye of the storm, a plan to get out is critical.

If the Barclays incident has made you think about what could go wrong in your business and how to respond to it, do give me a shout. We can provide anything from a list of potential issues to address, to media training for spokespeople and even a full crisis management plan to ensure you are ready.