I’m with ICICI Bank for the past 8 years. Before that I was banking with Indian Bank, same old way of visiting Bank branch with your passbook for entry.
Initially I was excited to get a ATM card and facility to withdraw as you wish and avoid the dreadful queues I was used to in Indian Bank (queues get worst when pension gets distributed). There were some kind of charges they were levying for the service ( debit card fee, min maintenance charge, chk book issuance etc). However since it was a Salary account, I got few waivers and wasnt much bothered at that point. After sticking up with ICICI for the last 8 years and availing good number of services ( & let downs), now I realise its time to look for other options. Here is summary of my experience with the bank.
ATM Services: Very good. Most of the cities and even smaller towns now have the ATM. And I found their uptime to be 90-95%. Rarely I found a ATM to be defunct.
Bank Services: Bad. Now a days, its no different than the Indian Bank. For any simple transaction plan for atleast 1 hour. Since I dont go to the bank often, there wasnt much impact to me.
Customer Service: Worst. The worst part being the people. Very shallow knowledge and they don’t understand what customer service is. Their process are so screwed up that the service people literally follow them even at the cost of customer dissatisfaction. ( e.g any password reset, would be sent by mail in 5-7 days!
Online banking: Average. I beleive the services they offer here (bill pay, fund transfer) is good and is free of charge. ( As I understand other banks charge for these). Technically the site is totally screwed up one with surprising timeouts, session expiry and the dreaded back/front button of your browser, poor usability. If I was their IT manager, I wouldnt have allowed such a site to come up at all in the first place. If you forget your password, then you are doomed.
Demat Services: Average: Most of the time, their market analysis, charts etc would timeout or throw javascript errors. Simple Buy, Sell service was good and typically the sales gets processed with in a minute.
Some other services are not available during the day trade time :-(. Studpid security policy. Requires you to change the password every 2 weeks. If you forget your password, then you would need to sit idle for 5-7 days before you get paper password.
I would suggest people to go to ICICI as long as they only use services not involving any of ICICI people. The moment you get interacting with them, then get ready for the nightmare.
I would like the readers to suggest some other options which would work for me. I’m primarily looking at these features:
Decent ATMs in the city ( Chennai)
Need bill pay facilities for telephone, credit card bills
Fund transfer to different accounts
No ATM/Debit card charges or annual maintenance charges etc