Broken website? Quick – Tweet it!!
Westpac’s online banking was experiencing problems during business hours. Having tried to use it around 9am, there was definitely some issues with logging in and it was very slow.
Westpac customers who are following Westpac on Twitter were made aware of this by a tweet.
Planned outages on the site would normally have obvious banners throughout the site, warning customers that the site was down for maintenance, so we can only assume this was an unplanned issue, especially given the timing of it.
Westpac were quick to announce to customers via Twitter that they were experiencing problems with online banking, and also responding directly to customer queries.
Why use Twitter rather than the website?
Twitter is a much faster way to get the message out to customers as Westpac is likely to have very structured release cycles that don’t allow for them to quickly change messages on the website.
But they are also trying to quickly respond to the volume of queries or complaints about online banking being unavailable.
This is a good example of using social media to quickly get messages out to customers. But this only seems to translate to the Twitter channel – as there was no mention of this on Westpac’s Facebook page.
