TD Bank's virtual silver lining

They’ll always have Twitter.

While TD Bank’s “once-a-decade” systems failure last week might have a serious impact on its reputation for convenience and reliability, it also offered an unusual customer-service opportunity: managing a crisis almost exclusively through Twitter.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a bank use Twitter in this way,” said Robert Hunt, a senior research director at TowerGroup, the independent research firm owned by MasterCard.  “Banks have been using Twitter to communicate with customers, but this is the first time I’ve seen them use it to communicate about a major computer outage. … You have to give them credit for opening up a new channel to allow customers to voice their frustrations.”

Indeed, while many types of corporations have used the microblogging service to market themselves and respond to individual consumer complaints, few large companies have relied on Twitter to manage through the sort of systems-wide failure that TD Bank continued trying to resolve on Monday.

“We just wanted to make sure we were reaching out to customers with every means possible … and Twitter’s an important tool,” spokesman Nick Petter said Monday.

True, that may have been more necessity than forethought for TD Bank, as more conventional means of customer interaction, like toll-free telephone numbers, couldn’t handle the call volume from irate customers looking for their direct deposits.

And verdicts were mixed on whether TD Bank’s efforts to placate consumers were actually effective. Many of the messages its “Ask_TDBank” Twitter team posted were formulaic reassurances rather than specific responses to individual complaints.  As one user posted Thursday, “@Ask_TDBank stop COPY/PASTING same thing!!! Give us meaningful updates!!!”

Trish Dorsey, a senior vice president of financial services brand and communications at TNS Global, called TD Bank’s Twitter efforts “the first step in the right direction. What that means though is that you have a responsibility to engage people in a really high-touch way. The fact that people are getting the sense that they’re just copying and pasting … it could backfire.”

Hunt agreed. “Is the response as good as it could be? No,” he said. “But I have to admit, even if you were a little more expansive in the answer and try to explain the problem, it’s not going to make the customer feel significantly better.”

Petter said, “As many customers have been asking the same questions, naturally many of our answers have been similar. … We’ve also been engaging customers in longer conversations as required, both through Twitter and on customer blogs.”

(As of 9:30 a.m. Monday, “all balances are up to date, all accounts are up to date,” Petter said, but there continue to be some problems with overnight posting of deposits. “We’re making progress each day, but we don’t have a firm estimate of when we’ll return to normal,” he said. “But we certainly haven’t let up.")

But in the silver-lining department, having a massive, week-long systems failure is also a great way to pick up “followers” on Twitter, where having as many online friends as possible reading your 140-character-or-less updates is a major status symbol. Thursday morning, “Ask_TDBank” had 18 followers; 24 hours later, that figure hit 115. By Monday afternoon it had reached 164.

This reporter, who recently crossed the 100-follower mark after months of dutiful Tweeting, offers her congratulations to TD Bank on that success.