Sunday, March 20, 2011

Chase Down Again......


Just when I thought Chase had a handle on the availability of their website they prove me wrong. Perhaps merely the act of thinking good thoughts caused the outage......

Let's decompose their message:

  1. "We're working quickly to restore access" - Now, if this is a 'planned' outage for database backup or the application of patches, then tell me when that process will be complete. If it truly is an unplanned outage then I presume you're working diligently (but I don't really know what 'working quickly' means). In fact I'd rather you tell me that you don't know what he problem is, but your on-call staff have been notified, the SLA for response is 15 minutes and you'll post regular updates. That would be much more valuable;
  2. "and we encourage you to log on later" - Well, duh. If I was trying to log on now and the site is unavailable then it's reasonable to expect that indeed I will be coming back. I don't need any encouragement to do that (late fees for not paying my credit card bill on time is all the 'encouragement' that I need...).;
  3. "Thanks for your patience" - rather presumptuous of Chase. I don't have a choice and I'm certainly not being patient.
So Chase, here's some advice. Drop the dumb message that one of your engineers wrote when told to throw up a Gone Fishing page. In fact they would have been more successful with a simple "Gone Fishing" message as that's about as useful as the message you are currently displaying.

What's the best Gone Fishing message you've ever seen?