Intelligent Website Design and Development

Card Payment Processing Failure: Now THAT'S an apology

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Firstly, an apology from Prater Raines.

Any of our clients trying to pay us via our online card payment system on Friday were unable to do so until around 3pm due to a technical problem with our payment processing provider. We're pleased to say this was resolved by around 3pm, and the system should now be working normally.

If you were attempting to pay on Friday by debit / credit card and failed, please do retry now or call us on 0845 363 7163 and we will be more than happy to help.

This leads though to the apology Prater Raines received from that Payment Services Provider - Realex Payments - this morning. It said:

As you know Realex Payments experienced a severe service outage on Friday last week between 8.58am and 3.04pm. As noted in our last status update, Friday was the worst day in our history. We want to emphasise and again apologise to all our clients for this unacceptable and most disruptive outage. For all of our clients - large and small, domestic and international - to lose payment processing is simply not an option. We are undergoing a detailed review of what occurred and we will implement all the changes and actions necessary to ensure that this cannot happen again.

Our support teams and corporate account managers are all on standby and more than happy to meet and engage with any businesses or partners who would like to review this in more detail. Once again, we apologise and we assure you of our 100% commitment to taking the corrective action.

Gary Conroy, Chief Operating Officer, Realex Payments

We're impressed with that.

Something went wrong. They held their hands up, said sorry (and said it from the top, rather than the bottom of the company), understand how important it could have been, are working to ensure it can never happen again, and have offered any personal support required to its clients.

Kudos to Realex for getting the apology right.