My employer asked me to open their salary account with HDFC, as was the norm with that company. No hassles. Did that. Went on with life. Trouble started when I switched company. I was asked to open salary account with another bank. A while after HDFC realised that my monthly salary was was not getting credited to their account, the asked me to close that account and open a different saving bank account, a normal one. When I enquired why I cannot treat this as my normal SB account (which I was doing with ICICI - my first salary account was with ICICI and even after I moved from my first employer, I still have it as a normal SB account without any problem from their end.), I was told that my salary account enjoyed certain previleges, (god knows what the previleges are) and that cannot be extended to a normal SB account. I then asked them to withdraw the so called previleges and let me have this account. My problem was I had a demat account with HDFC and this SB was linked to it. Again a big NO NO from their side. Simply becoz the account number of salary accounts were coded in a certain fashion, which is their headache actually.
I underwent the pain of filling various forms to open new a/c, attach the new one to demat a/c, close old account etc. Very much of a pain because I had to do these activities sequentially and not parallely, because of the demat complication. So, that many visits to the bank. After all this, I got a communication from them which baffled me. They had chosed my old account (now closed) to credit dividends and new account to debit commissions and fees. I had to haggle with them again to find out what went wrong and came to know that, it was just a matter of filling one more form. When I asked them why they did not inform in the first place, I got a cool reply. This procedure has recently come into place, and hence we missed out. And I am still hoping my life would get back to normal with regard to HDFC bank.
And all this, simply because I opened a salary account with them.