Planned Maintenance and bad communication by Tesco Bank

  • jonathansherman's Avatar
    Fresh Eyes
    Did anyone else get caught out by the lack of push communication on yesterdays online services planned outage?

    Tesco Bank has all the contact details it needs to send something out by email or text, but apparently we had to be in online banking to see the notification. So if you didn't look at your accounts last week then hard luck apparently.

    This is not intelligent or courteous customer service and nor is putting an on screen message saying that there are no accounts under one's login. Surely not beyond the wit of man to put some clear and less alarming communication as to why services were not available.

    Also experienced declined card in Tesco store and the Tesco ATM down at the same time as the above outage. The agent I spoke to was not sure if these could be connected and had no definitive information. BTW it was the fraud number that I called a) because it is the only 24/7 line that TescoBank offers its' customers and b) because declined card followed by the system telling me I had no accounts made me think the worst.

    All in all a very poor impression given by Tesco Bank in managing communications on upgrades and maintenance. Still need to investigate what led to the card declination but this is very embarrassing in a supermarket checkout queue (Tesco of all places!). If this turns out to have been connected with the systems maintenance then I will looking at moving banks.
  • 2 Replies

  • Verified Answer

    JoeC's Avatar
    Your Community Expert
    Verified Answer
    Hi @jonathansherman and @Halbot, thanks for getting in touch. I'm very sorry that your experience this weekend has not been a positive one with us. In terms of the maintenance, I will get some feedback raised to say that you feel that we could have communicated this better. The online maintenance would not have affected the actual use of your cards to transact, so if you want to look into this further please send us a private message to @Tesco-Bank. I hope this helps.
  • Halbot's Avatar
    Fresh Eyes
    This was a terrible experience, I was in very nice restaurant, tried to pay and it was declined for no reason. Embarrassing. Checked the app and that wasn’t working which is when I realised Tesco had a problem. I was then mocked for using Tesco bank. Tesco need to respond to this, why were transactions being declined? That should never happen.