Banking websites: Contingency Design

I logged on to Citibank's site to access my Suvidha savings account. While browsing through the various services that my account offers I wanted to check how the 'Transfer Funds' feature works. The idea is quite simple: you choose an account from which funds are to be taken, and choose a bank account (Citibank's, or any other bank's) to which the funds are to be given. I clicked on 'Payees' (the recipient of your funds) and it popped this error:

A Runtime error occurred. Do you wish to debug? Line 25: 'top.Control.cbol' is null or not an object

Now, I can only assume that as there were no payees-I had not added any to my account-the script resulted in an error situation that Citibank (or whoever was given the website contract) never planned for. A minor problem; no sweat. Right? Wrong. Bad contingency design delivers a telling blow on customer-confidence. The first question that popped in my head was 'is this site as secure as it claims to be?' Now, the error in question and site security could be as related as Bush and intelligence, but to a code-blind person (most customers are code-blind mind you) an error is an error. Why can't these big corporates with fat budgets pay more attention to customer experience? I can understand a small company having a sloppy website: they do not have the resources or funds, but Citibank? Pch. Sad.
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

Add to:del.icio.us| Digg| Reddit| StumbleUpon| Technorati