Before he makes another triumphant presentation to institutional investors about Commonwealth Bank’s alleged industry-leading “digital experiences”, chief executive Matt Comyn should be asked to account for why his online platforms are more crash-prone than other Australian banks.
CBA’s internet and mobile banking systems have limped from one outage to another this year leaving the bank’s 16 million customers with no way of making and accepting payments on at least 15 days.
Despite the chronic interruptions to digital services since February, the bank is yet to enlighten account holders about the causes of the service failures and why they appear so difficult to fix.
Customers are baffled and frustrated by the bank’s unwillingness to explain the problems. After the latest outage on Tuesday morning, customer requests on social media for information about the causes of the faltering services levels went unanswered.
“Three times in three weeks is concerning,” one customer told the bank on Twitter.
“Are you any closer to getting to the root cause of the issue?
“Are you able to offer some sense of comfort to customers this won’t happen again in the near future?”
Comyn and his senior executives should be addressing such concerns directly but they seem more comfortable with the idea of keeping customers in the dark or holding on to a grand illusion that the digital experience at CBA is somehow best-in-class.
Since the start of April CBA has issued more than 60 media releases and not one of them discusses the issue of most concern to customers and regulators – the unreliable character of the bank’s online systems.
Instead, many of the releases actually boast about CBA’s professed leadership in digital banking, including one issued on 27 May under the headline: “CBA reimagines banking for the digital economy”.
That media release includes some notable comments from Comyn about how digital banking has apparently moved beyond traditional measures of customer service.
“We aim to be the most trusted partner at the centre of our customers’ financial lives by saving them money, giving them more control over their finances, and by making banking simpler and easier,” Comyn says in the release.
“We are integrating new services into our platform to customise and personalise the digital experience in ways that will increase engagement and bring greater value to our customers.
“It’s about moving beyond customer service and delivering more rewarding experiences and better outcomes that will build a deeper, more trusted relationship with our customers.”
Comyn also said in the May release that “CBA’s technology was redefining what customers expect from a bank”.
There’s some truth in that statement to the extent that the bank’s faltering systems are reshaping customer perceptions of the CBA brand.
Comyn only has to look at the thousands of customer posts made to CBA’s Twitter and Facebook pages in the last three months to understand how his digital platforms are failing decisively to generate trust and rewarding experiences.
While the increased frequency of outages seems to be generating deeper customer engagement it is for all the wrong reasons.
IT experts say Comyn is wrong to suggest that digital banking has moved beyond the basics of customer service.
“I think they’re losing customer confidence in the reliability of their systems,” says Glenn Stafford, principal consultant at Sydney IT consultancy, PerformPlus.
“The problem is they want to talk about customer experience on a multi-layered level when the true customer experience is really about people wanting unimpeded access to their money at any time through different channels.
“The outages in recent months have meant that CBA customers have lost that unimpeded access.”
Stafford suspects that the accelerated rollout of multiple new digital services through CBA’s digital channels might be contributing to the higher incidence of outages this year.
The addition of new front end services could be stretching the operating limits of the bank’s core banking platform.
CBA spent more than A$1.8 billion upgrading its core technology system between 2008 and 2013.
That massive capital expenditure appears to be delivering diminished returns in 2021, with Comyn facing a potentially bigger spend to correct the operational mess that his customers now endure.