I had a savings account with this bank and recently wanted to close the account. I am not in India now and as a result, I have not been using that account for some time. I went to the bank website thinking that I could phone them and find out the procedure for the account closure. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of going to the’HDFC’ site and not the’HDFC bank’ site. I called up the helpline and the lady at the other end was really rude. I admit that I made a mistake in calling the wrong helpline, but not only was the lady impatient but she also hung up while I was in the middle of a sentence!
I then went to the HDFC bank site and spent 30 minutes trying to find out the procedure for closing a bank account. I couldn’t find anything, except for some very confusing links. I then decided to try out the phone banking option. In the main menu, there was an instruction to dial 9 for speaking to a customer service executive. So I dialed 9 and waited for a response. There were the usual instructions to enter the required identification info., and then the menu shifted to’dial this number for mini stmt’ and’dial that number for last 10 stmts’ and so on. I tried to go back to the main menu and the instructions started looping. Neither was I able to access any option to speak to an actual person, nor was I able to access the main menu where I could dial the option’9’ again.
I then decided to send a query online and I got a response in under 12 hours telling me that the required forms were in a link in the homepage in tiny font. Easy to miss.
While I appreciate the efforts taken by the bank to put all the required information on the website, it would be great if the HDFC website was made more customer friendly.
It would also be great if the HDFC staff who do take calls please remember that not everybody who calls them knows everything about their bank, their website or even their helpline numbers. When a customer calls up with even the most trivial question, I think it deserves a courteous answer. While it was my mistake that I did call up the wrong helpline, I don’t think I deserved a hang up.
I will not be banking with HDFC in future.