Having seen so many reviews about banks on MS, a majority of them being unpleasant experiences even in case of new gen. banks who raised the benchmarks and even hype to some extent, I was pondering as to where the dissatisfaction(and many times deficiency in service as well) is stemming from. Funnily there are reviews against RBI also under the category and I wonder what business the ordinary folks have with RBI except as an Ombudsman.
Surprisingly I find many of the higher rating reviews are pertaining to the good old PSU banks( leaving an odd private guy like YES bank etc, which has only a few reviews) which offer much lesser in terms of technological/banking features to a customer(trying to catch up somewhat now a days) but they even demand less from the customer, may be governed by their USO charter built into their tariff & other condition structure for all the sections of the society. Rather all the networked banks like ICICI, AXIS, HDFC, CITI, HSBC/S&C/ABN got much lesser ratings though they offer much more in terms of customer oriented features, value your time and automated information through Netbanking & Push/pull mobile SMS, at a reasonable AQB requirements for SB/current/OD accts. Imagine how many such customers they need to mobilize for recovering huge investments on such systems put in place by them and also to get a reasonable chunk of CA/SBs which are the cheapest source of funds, to lend it to the large loan portfolios to earn an interest income or fee income from availing the select facilities they offer. Our pan India networked banks like ICICI/AXIS/HDFC also offer tremendous reach for us and but they expect customers who wish to avail non-home branch services to foot disproportionate part of their costs which was not adequately borne by other channels like branches/ATMs to the required levels. Now with the latest RBI draft stipulations on zero ATM charges from 2009, it will be a big loss for the these banks who invested/plan to invest to open remote ATMs, & it is rather prudent to be a parasite on other banks ATMs and pay them the cost decided by RBI. Indeed a very bad incentive to their efforts compared to a Foreign bank or a Kotak/YES/Centurion/IndusInd with their poor ATM reach.
The point here is naturally they cannot offer such personalized touch to the ever increasing no. of customers as per our expectation level stemming from our old PSU banking habits with simpler transactions. Remember the days when we use to feel as a Priority customer when PSU tellers oblige to pay us or accept cash after the bank official timingsof 200 pm., nevermind we were ready to wait till he finishes his snack & chai in half an hour’s time and resume duties at 0230 pm. But now we yell at the poor chaps in networked banks in case of any unusual delay. I think many of us expect us to be treated as a person in blood & flesh with our own ego or self-esteem… or whatever. May be the neighbourhood PSU banks in the pre-ATM era where the Officers & local staff use to offer their unsophisticated genuine personal touch in our transactions, not necessarily as a part of their duties but more because of their familiarity with our face and also to maintain cordial human relations in general. Manager talking to us directly used to be a rare honour to us and now we straight away walk to their cubicle in the networked banks banks. To my mind it is time to tone down our expectations for what we pay and given the huge growth of customer base at branches which simply they find unable to cater forget about personal touch. At the same time it is also a case that even if you are a Priority Customer with these new gen banks you get no bigger deal as per my personal experiences with their inbuilt imperfections, never mind their glossy brochures and swanky branches many times armed with guys having poor Product knowledge(even the young BMs).
Inspite of a lot being said about them esp., ICICI & Axis, they have far superior grievance redressal mechanisms in place and every complaint is assigned an automatically generated tracking number and believe me, may be it will take 10-15 days in odd cases but they will ensure the full history of the complaint and the technicalities behind the transactions are fully verified and they comeback with solutions or atleast address the problem correctly. But at the same time there are certain smart banks among them also like Kotak Mahindra, Citibank etc whose routine reply is that the branch will contact you and the branch never bothers.
In select cases these guys give such tracking no and they comeback at times with a reply of generous apologies and ask you for some more time for a couple of times. Even if they comeback you have to narrate the Ramayan several times to several people and end up with half-baked solutions and in many cases you get totally fedup with useless/no response and forget the issue altogether. Now the bank is also happy that the problem is solved.
PS: I donot work in/for a bank