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When their outage becomes your problem...

Writer's picture: Daniela  Parker Daniela Parker

One of the most valuable lessons I've learned in my career is to "never let a good crisis go to waste." In my operational days, it was all about putting out fires. Expanding into business continuity offered a crucial perspective that I find is often still missing – continuous improvement. 


How can we extract valuable lessons from incidents, big or small, even when they happen to someone else? That's where the real magic happens – proactive planning instead of reactive scrambling. And it drives home the point that "this can actually happen to us."


Take the recent Capital One outage. It seems a power failure at a data center belonging to their third-party vendor, FIS Global, disrupted deposit and payment services for days. While the root cause is still unclear, that's not my focus today. Seeing any organization struggle with this kind of disruption isn't pleasant, but I believe in using these situations to evaluate our own capabilities and identify areas for improvement.


Here's what we can learn from Capital One's experience:


  1. Third-Party Risks are Real: This outage underscores the critical importance of understanding how your third (and fourth, and fifth...nth!) parties support your critical processes. Surely Capital One did all the required vendor due diligence, but collecting and analyzing documents does not stop a power outage at a data center. Nor does it ensure that your organization is prepared to respond. And most importantly – your members/customers do not care whether a third party had a problem.  To them, you’re having a problem.   

 

  1. Communication Needs to be Proactive and Transparent: Capital One's external communication seemed lacking. Their website offered no information, and their social media updates were infrequent, leaving customers frustrated and in the dark. Effective communication during a crisis is crucial for maintaining trust and managing expectations. It might be their strategy on the communication front, but the question then for you is whether your organization would be ok with that approach.

 

  1. Empower Your Frontline: Based on customer feedback, it appears Capital One's call center agents were ill-equipped to handle the situation. Conflicting information and a lack of clear answers only added to the frustration. Your frontline staff needs to be prepared and empowered to address concerns during critical incidents. (On a sidenote: there were about 12k comments on Facebook, which is not a lot considering the more than 100 million customers Capital One has.  Keep in mind that the focus isn’t so much on Capital One, but how you and your organization would respond to this situation and what your tolerance is when it comes to member or customer impact.) 

 


My call to action for you: Don't just observe this incident from afar. Schedule a 30-minute meeting with stakeholders in your organization this week and use this outage as a case study. Ask yourselves:


  • How would our team be impacted if a key service provider experienced an outage?

  • Are our customers/members prepared to hear from us only once a day while they're waiting for their paychecks to post or payments to process?

  • Is our frontline ready to answer questions confidently and provide support?

  • Do we truly understand our dependencies on third parties, and would we be notified promptly in the event of an incident?

  • What else should we consider here?


I've included a 30 Minute Communication Tune Up below to help you facilitate this conversation with a focus on communication, and to capture opportunities for improvement. Don’t let this crisis go to waste!


 

Daniela




 


 


PS: Brian, Glen, and I did an episode on this last year, and I’ve included a link below. 






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