If you're a customer of Chase Bank and you're wondering what's up with your online banking status, you're not alone. Try doing a twitter search for the hashtag #chasefail and you'll see plenty of other customers just like yourself who have taken to social media to voice their concerns about the the bank giant's online failure which caused their website to be down for more than 24 hours. According to the Chicago Tribune, 16.5 million customers were left without the ability to access their accounts online. Automated payments were not affected, but users were left without the ability to check their account balances or pay bills online. The Tribunes article ends with a mention of a man who actually had to go to a bank to check his account status. Likeable Media's Carrie Kerpen offered up a good point.
It's no surprise that customers and Twitter users are reacting as strongly as they are. After all, the team at Chase has been proclaiming their presence in the online banking world louder than anyone else has. Have you seen the Chase commercial featuring the newlyweds whose first line of business in their Honeymoon suite is to deposit checks using the Chase iPhone application? When a company professes that loudly that they're the leaders in virtual banking, it makes a fail like this all the more embarassing.
As if they needed to add insult to injury, the spokespeople are singing a different tune than the employees themselves. Tom Kelly, a spokesperson for Chase said in regards to customers directly affected the online banking failure: "Whatever the issue is, we're happy to talk with them,"
According to Twitter, and customer experience it appears that "talking" is all the company is prepared to do. Pat Kiernan, anchor for NY1 News tweeted about his experience earlier today:
Kiernan later tweeted about more issues with the banking website, and even took it upon himself to take partial responsibility for his overdraft charge.
Is it Kiernan's fault? No. When a company as large as Chase openly professes their leadership in the digital world and then they fail, they're the ones at fault. The customer has done nothing but trust the message that's been presented to them. It would be a completely different story if Chase had presented themselves as "The Leader in 2 Day Service," but that hasn't been the case. They didn't show the happy couple depositing checks and then getting access to the money 4 days leter in the Bahamas. Those ads had one clear message of immediate satisfaction. With advertising like that, you'd expect immediate satisfaction.
Granted, the story isn't through being told yet. It's still early enough for Chase to fix these problems and restore faith among their customers. The first step should definitely be providing customer service to users who were directly affected by the failure. Corporate communication is key in a situation like this. All Chase employees need to be aprised of the situation in order to save the company's reputation. After all, the company spokesperson speaks for the company. He doesn't speak to the customer. If those two individuals arent on the same page, you have a much bigger problem than your website failure. You will have just failed your customers.
Here's hoping that Chase gets it's act together in the coming days. Otherwise, @ChrsLove on Twitter has Chase's next logo re-design.
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