Bad IT is Worse Than No IT

Love it or hate it, we are all stuck with IT. We tolerate it's faults and frustrations, we often accept less than we would like because some IT is normally better than no IT. But not always.

Customer-facing IT - normally delivered via the Internet, is an exacting art. It must be quick, easy to use, provide up to date information, and above all be reliable and accurate. Recent experience of using the electronic banking system provided by a major UK high street bank, the IT division of which would be a FTSE 100 entity in it's own right if separated out, has reminded me that however hard an organisation strives to present its qualities, attributes and values to the customer, all that effort can all be swept away in moments through bad IT.

In the instance I have suffered, the bank has set up a new account for me for one of my businesses. The business name contains a hyphen ("-"). The account name set up in the online banking system contains a hyphen. All seemed fine with initial use, I could check my balance etc., but when I attempted to make a payment to a supplier, whose account is also with the same bank, I found I could not - all my attempts failed with the message "Payment rejected by bank". I had plenty of cash in the account, more than enough to cover the payment, so I contacted my bank manager, who set an investigation in process.

It turned out that the payments system of the bank in question cannot cope with receiving payments from accounts with hyphens, brackets etc. in the account name. So despite the online banking system having permitted bank staff to set up my internet banking with a business name containing a hyphen, the account could never be used to make payments. The (defective) back-end payments system made sure of that. 

As an IT professional my response was - "Fix the ******* payments system!". The bank's response was "We'll change your account name in the Internet banking system." So now I have electronic banking with an account name that doesn't adequately reflect my business name. Worse, my account manager requested this simple data change on a Friday, however the bank could not execute it until the following Tuesday - four days for a simple data change! Fortunately my supplier was tolerant about not being paid promptly.

My impression of the bank now is that I cannot trust their software and systems, business processes or staff to treat my data with integrity. If the customer facing systems have been so crudely and negligently constructed, how can I place any trust in the integrity of the back-end systems which they use to manipulate my data but are kept hidden from me? Simply, I can't. The crude amateurishness of the way they have handled that which I can see has totally undermined my confidence in the rest of the organisation - as a customer I can only see that which the bank shows to me - the small portion of iceberg visible above the waterline. If that is visibly rotten I naturally assume that the rest, which I cannot see, must be equally rotten or worse.

Customer-facing IT systems must be reliable and accurate, in today's world they are for many businesses the primary interface between the customer and the organisation, they are in many cases the sole outward representation and manifestation of the organisation. Whether they provide e-shopping, e-banking or some other online function, they must be as close to perfection as the organisation can achieve. Anything less than total accuracy and reliability is negligent, it alienates, disengages and disenfranchises customers whose confidence, once lost, may never be regained. It would be better commercially to have no customer-facing IT than to have poor customer-facing IT, so no business can have any excuse for second-rate customer-facing systems, and the only possible reasons are incompetence or disdain for their customers. The old adage "if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing well" applies as much to IT as any other discipline.

As for my bank, their behaviour has confirmed to me that their massive IT division is incompetent. The only question in my mind now, as a customer, is which other bankers will be better / best for me.