15 Feb 2016 Your data is not safe with them
From so many instances of fraud and cheating it was quite obvious for me to close all my accounts with them. Last week I closed my credit cards.
You know what happened? In a day of submitting credit card closure request, my mailbox started flooding with credit card offers from other banks.
It may be hard to prove but looks quite obvious that some employees of this doomed bank are selling email addresses of people closing credit card accounts.
Goes without saying that your private data is not safe with them.
Of course this is not surprising given the frauds they have committed with my account as mentioned in my last posts.
10 Jan 2016 Worst home loan provider in the industry; humorous customer service(if not annoying)
ICICI Bank is probably the only bank among large banks in the home loan business, where even to see your current rate of interest you will have to visit the branch.
They used to keep most of the information on the website. In last few years they have stopped it. They don’t respond to email or phone either on home loan queries and force you to go to the branch.
Now when the service quality is so broken at email/phone level one can only imagine what to expect from the morons sitting in the bank. Each visit to get any home loan related information easily consumes a couple of hours in the bank, waiting in the queue and finally seeing a moron who thinks he or she is making a big favor by attending to you.
Fade up of this I am switching my home loan and would advise not to buy their home loan even they give it for free. You are stuck with completely non-transparent institution and product if you make the mistake of buying their loans.
It’s not only about having to visit the branch. Once I did a so called loan conversion that allowed me to switch to a lower interest rate by paying certain fees. This itself took a couple of visits of couple of hours. In the end the moron told me that I’ll receive a letter indicating the changed rate of interest. A month elapsed and there was no sign of any letter. It took several mails and escalation etc to finally get the revised spread for the rate of interest in written.
If you don’t want to get worked up, you can see ICICI’s customer service in lighter vein. They are very seriously humorous people if you develop the habit of seeing the humor.
Firstly you don’t have to mind it when their email response says "we tried to contact you". It’s just a ritual. They don’t ever try to contact you. You won’t see any missed call on your phone, but you will invariably see a statement in their reply that they tried to call you.
Perhaps the customer service is fooling their bosses by claiming that they are following the process of talking to the customer.
But that apart. Coming to the most humorous statement in banking industry. The customer service replied the following when I asked why they have stopped providing loan related data through the portal:
"in order to have a personal engagement with the customer and to understand the requirements in detail we have restricted the availability of below mentioned statements ."
They want personal engagement with customers or they want to enjoy punishing the customers in person? Meeting their morons at the branch is nothing short of that - a punishment. And is that a "reason" to disable certain views on the portal? So this reply by them qualifies to be nothing but humor.
The reality is that they are not confident of retaining the customers and are afraid that if the loan account is kept transparent it will make it easy for the customers to compare loans with others and switch, particularly as pre-payment charges are waived by Govt order now. That must be the real reason, behind telling above joke to the customers.
09 Jan 2016 A successful escalation to ombudsman
I was their customer for nearly 15 years and it will take several posts for me to provide instances of unprofessional and below par service by this mediocre bank.
Their customer care email id never responds and escalation points probably are paid to come to the office and take naps. If you have time and energy you have to take the matter to banking ombudsman and hope for it to be resolved.
In one of numerous such matters, I decided to take the banking ombudsman route and did so successfully. I’d highly recommend taking the ombudsman route. Banking services in our country are getting rusty and they take customers for granted only because 99% of us, customers, are "tolerant" and to avoid hassles we are just used to let it go.
The process of going to ombudsman is easy, completely online. Just ensure that you attach a copy of(outrageous) replies you got from the bank in the complaint. Otherwise the ombudsman won’t entertain your complaint.
In this matter, I noticed a debit in my account with just a cryptic number written against it. The portal, the fund transfer or bill pay history, nothing could relate with this number. Hence I queried to the bank who was the beneficiary of the transaction as there was no record.
Keeping in with tradition of giving stereotype answers and taking customer for granted, they said since I asked this question 30 days after the statement they will be unable to provide the details.
Escalated the matter to their appellate officer. By now you’d know that perhaps the people in customer care and nodal officer are no different. They just take more time and give the same stupid answer back.
Finally I took the matter to the ombudsman. One day, to my surprise, I got a printed letter on a high quality paper with bank’s apology written on it and the details of transaction I had asked for.
So the ombudsman system really works. Only regret was the ombudsman "formally" rejected the complaint allowing the bank to get away with a clean record.
22 Dec 2015 A fraud named reward points
I am a close to 15 years customer of ICICI Bank. Initially the bank was good, though in
last 3/4 years I have had several horrible experiences with the bank.
Worst is they have become careless and are least bothered about customer dissatisfaction.
I’ll post about several of bad experiences, but this one tops them all and at this point I decided to break all my relationships with ICICI Bank through various of their products.
So called "award winning" rewards program called "payback" is the bank’s brainchild. It’s the bank that created this entity and forced customers to transfer all reward points to this entity.
The fraud happened by way of unauthorized redemption of my reward points. Payback claims I ordered some stupid chocolate pack for 2000 points. Reality is I’d never order such a product.
Further, biggest evidence that this was a fake order is the AWB number recorded against the order. The AWB number is(quite expectedly) fake as the courier company does not recognize this number.
Payback says I must register the complaint within 30 days of redemption, else they can’t entertain it. Now, on so called redemption, neither I received any SMS nor email, so how was I supposed to come to know about it? Just because payback employees can commit fraud shall I keep looking for redemption order day in day out?
Worse part is, its parent firm who is responsible to hand over my hard earned points into the hands of these robbers says nothing more than "contact payback". I don’t think they have any right to say so because it wasn’t me who chose payback. It’s they who have chosen to move my points to payback.
I am talking about the response from Appellate authority of ICICI Bank. Their normal customer service never ever responds.
This was the last incidence with ICICI Bank where I decided to completely do away with the relationship. I have maintained a good record of all email threads of illogical and rude replies from them on various issues and will be posting them one by one.