Barclays Case Study

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Service Recovery Communications

The challenge

Barclays Bank depend on their global IT systems daily. When incidents occur with these systems, they need a fast way to communicate with all relevant stakeholders 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The solution

Simon Wilkinson is very impressed with Rapide, here he explains why -

"The Barclays Bank Service Recovery Team is responsible for managing all major incidents that could impact any of the IT services used across Barclays Bank plc. As well as managing the technical recovery of the failed service, we must ensure that appropriate communications are delivered to all relevant stakeholders. This is where Rapide comes in.

"As soon as we become aware of a major incident, one of our Service Recovery Managers (SRMs) will use Rapide via the web interface to send out a text broadcast. We have created several Message Lists to provide for a number of standard scenarios; e.g. we have a Message List containing recipients who are only interested in knowing about incidents that affect Barclaycard services. We have also created a number of message templates to speed up the creation of our incident messages and also to ensure a consistent language. We then continue to use Rapide to deliver incident updates and incident resolution statements; i.e. when the impacted service has been restored.

"Because Barclays is a global bank with extensive worldwide operations, IT incidents can happen at any time of the day or night. We therefore use Rapide to deliver incident messages on a 24/7 basis. During an average day (24 hours) we will typically use Rapide 5 to 10 times delivering text messages to an average of 100 recipients and sometimes as many as 500. Although we use the Rapide web interface most of the time, we have also successfully used the remote facility on a small number of occasions. It is crucial to our role in Barclays to know that we have robust contingency should the normal web interface delivery channel be unavailable for any reason such as an evacuation from our normal office.

"We find the Rapide service to be an invaluable tool in our armoury. We tried another product before Rapide but found it too cumbersome to use and text message delivery was also very slow compared to Rapide. The web interface is simple to use and our text broadcasts are now typically delivered to all recipients within 10-15 seconds. We have also found the customer support to be first class and the whole team at Rapide have consistently been ready and willing to help us achieve all of our objectives in using the product. We would certainly recommend Rapide to other organisations looking for an effective and efficient text broadcast service."

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