Having been thinking of venting my frustration with ICICI’s Call Centre for many months now and decided Mouthshut should be the place. I happened to forget my password and naively called the Call Centre hoping they would help.
I fail to understand why banks invest their money in those badly designed CRMs and customer call services! I am sure this is because in ICICI’s case someone from the competition planted a mole deep into ICICI’s IT team taking a decision on software purchases and they ended up with the thingamjig they have -ostensibly for customer support!
How else do you explain the horrendous experience you go through- waiting for an eternity for the %$# music to end and growing mad as the wait over the phone goes up everytime, pushing buttons like a chimp hoping it would be rewarded with the banana if it presses the right ones, repeating those steps so many times that at the end you know the sequence of buttons all right but you are far away from your goal- talking to some human at the other end and not a machine generated voice instructing you to punch this number or another every two seconds!
Well at the end of some 15 minutes of punching and being told to wait for a long time, hanging up, calling back and re-punching those numbers again, I finally achieved success. Got through to a human being at last! Told him my problem and he says’Sorry Sir! You have reached the wrong department! Press 1-1-4-1 or some such number after reaching the menu." So went back to the same loop again, mentally tearing up ICICI’s customer relationship managers to shreds as I punched the buttons to salvation. Reached another guy and this time he repeated the same thing as the first one except the button sequence was something like 1-1-4-2. When I pointed out I had followed what the first guy had said and reached him. He was apologetic but he could not help.
Was pushing the CR managers into a hell-hole while punching buttons this time and reached someone again. This guy again turned out to be from some other department and he again gave some stupid sequence 1-1-4-2-2 or something.
I said I was tired from all that punching of buttons couldn’t he directly transfer me to the department. Guess what? He couldn’t! This time he said, you have to press the buttons’1-1-4-2-2’ or whatever, immediately after the welcome message. I put down the phone with his "Do not wait for the message to end, " ringing in my ears and as eager one can be under the cisrcumstances, punched to glory. The ICICI CR managers where this time coming out of the wrong end of a pig in hell!
At the end of all this, reached the part of the menu where a dis-embodied voice asked me if I had forgotten my password among other problems that ICICI customers routinely face. I knew now how the Israelites felt when they first saw the Promised Land, when Hillary and Tenzing stood atop Everest, when. you get the gist?
Pressed some more buttons to confirm my problem and do you know the solution it offered me at the end- " Visit our website and click on such-and-such link on such-and-such page to ask for a new password!"
I will not tell you what was happening to ICICI’s CR managers this time!