Posts by Adam Brooke 6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2011
A technical argument for managing customer expectation is always due to fail particularly in banking, where people are actually unable to travel home because there debit & credit cards are not getting authorised.
While I value you technical opinion the gross majority of RBS/Natwest's customers see the customer experience, not an ITIL breakdown of pain points in an SLA.
are unemployed, disabled or unwell. They may or may not be scrounging on benefits according to your position, but the reality is that many people have £0.00 balances (or less) and the timely payment makes the difference between their homes being warm or cold tonight.
I assume you have a rainy day fund by your post, but when nearly a quarter of people in this country are in fuel poverty (technically 10% of their income on heating) but with reality that the quantitative values on fuel poverty are that the top 20% of them are spending 50% on heating the cliched "Heat or Eat" comes to mind.
No doubt you are successful within your domain and warm this weekend but if like 82% of the UK workforce you have a one month notice on your contract, a mortgage and a car that you believe impresses you neighbours then just imagine how long your savings would last to maintain your current quality of life.
I would be interested to hear how you would "adjust your lifestyle" in such a predicament and how you respond to hitting the advance button on your heating and not having enough credit to keep your heating on.
So your closing statement is valid, get your coat, put it on and stop preaching.
A show of hands for the call centre staff who have been fielding irate customers all day, with Natwest management not saying anything apart from the ambiguous statement on the site disussed in this thread.
An update is due at 18:00. I wonder if there is a connection with the 3D secure compromise they had a week or so ago. Natwest meets Sony, now that would be fun.
This problem did not commence at 7 am as you stated, scheduled maintenance in the form of a large software update commenced at 01:30 this morning and at circa later the message reminding their customers of this was replaced by the current message. I have been informed by Natwest that all accounts are frozen as they were yesterday and that the problem is affecting their systems globally.
This suggests that the problem lies deeper than the web Customer Self Management and Customer Self Management and Customer Relationship Management systems that the automated and advisor assisted telephone banking services use respectively.
Testing shall commence at 12:00 and while unable to confirm a time for the services to be restored their is a rough estimate "of some time this afternoon".
For those of you like myself who through a quirk get paid today with direct debits also being taken out over the weekend it shall be interesting to see how this one pans out.
Source: My insomnia.
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