Handling big tech outage requires personal touch

When the lights – or systems – unexpectedly go out, are you prepared to keep delivering day-to-day service offerings to clients?

This was the lesson learned last Friday as the world experienced the “largest IT outage in history”, when computer systems crashed worldwide because of a CrowdStrike issue.

Although several advisors InvestmentNews reached out to weren’t impacted, there were a few who experienced the outage firsthand. Jack Heintzelman, advisor at Boston Wealth Strategies, says that while they weren’t impacted in a major way, their clients lost access to account information for several hours.

The way to respond to that situation is simply the personal touch, he says. “It's the ability, for us as advisors, to be proactive in our communication and be in front of clients so that they feel comfort, trust us with their money and that it's in the right place,” he says.

As technology will continue to evolve and grow, Heintzelman added, clients’ trust in technology will also grow.

“The things that they access and the way they access their information is going to be very tech-oriented, but it still is important for us as advisors to have that personal touch,” he said. “To have a voice to the name and to have a face to the name so that clients know that when the technology does not work, we are here, and we are available.”

For other advisors, it’s an opportunity to freshen up systems and review reports, creating a back-up plan for the next big outage.

“We have someone within our team working on exactly that,” said Chuck Failla, CEO of Sovereign Financial Group. “We have one in place. It seemed like it was sufficient but she's using this as an opportunity to take another fresh look at it to see if there's any way we can even enhance upon what we already have.”

Failla remarked that while bad things do happen by circumstance, even if another tech blackout was to happen, advisors shouldn’t be too quick to drop their tech provider.

“We would have to do a postmortem to find out, where was the problem? Was it a shortfall or was it just something that could not have been prevented?” Failla said.

“We see breaches all the time. Companies bigger than us have had breaches. Sometimes things get through the goal. We would have to be sure that it was a systematic failure on their part. I would have to be convinced that they were asleep at the wheel, or they were not doing everything they could do,” he added.

Heintzelman was quick to offer his two cents for advisors, asserting the next time an outage happens, advisors should specify the impact of the outage to their clients, and how it impacts them.

“Understand the situation, be proactive and let clients know how it impacts them,” he says. “Be communicative throughout the process until resolution. After that, provide them with ways you're going to ensure this doesn't happen, or you're prepared for it in future.”

Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to manage a firm during an outage. For the individual advisors, Failla is quick to highlight that having additional IT support would be in their best interest.

“This is something that's important enough and serious enough that it requires its own dedicated person within a firm, or if you're not large enough to have that, which we are not, a good, dedicated IT support vendor that's on 24/7, as ours is.”