Fed up of service quality and poor rates of interest of brick and mortar bank, I was trying out a few digital options. I have written separate reviews on airtel payment bank(which still fails to open an account for me) and digibank(a lot buggy software and processes, but the only option that works as of now). There are several others like Yes, RBL, who only talk of digital account but don’t even respond after filling their forms. So finally one left to be tried was Kotak 811.
Firstly DBS Digibank pays much better interest and the account works pretty well for me. Only reason to go to kotak was DBS is not yet accepted on many portals for netbanking, while kotak’s netbanking acceptance is better.
Account opening went through fine. I’d have perhaps rated them higher, until an occasion to interact with their poor customer service occurred.
There was a strange "vpa creation failed" error when using upi in 811 app. Followed up on this and got standard replies like "Try again later" etc. which merely killed time. As of today the error is still there.
When they sought screen shots, I sent those. Got an auto-reply saying that the email id to which I was told to send the screen shots would be decommissioned after 01 Oct. On quoting this message and asking, after 01 Oct where to send the screen shots a reply came giving the same email id asking to send emails to that!
Looks like at Kotak Bank, machines are answering all questions and there is a competition for stupid replies between machines and their human counterparts.
Anyway, on following up further over phone, as I did not get a reply, I was told the complaint has already been closed. There was no notification to me about the closure. On probing further they said "because you sent PDF attachment the complaint was closed. You must send screen shot in MS Word"!
That’s a joke of sorts. This bank is incapable of reading PDF attachments? Would the promoters be proud of this?
Further, filed an issue seeking senior management view on whether they accept that this bank can’t open PDF attachments and they are technologically that backward.
This issue is pending and every time I remind a stupid chatbot replies that they will get back after 7 working days. Many such 7 working days elapsed. No answer on this.
Then tried following the escalation hierarchy and tried to log a level 2 complaint only to see a pop up saying there was an error filing the complaint. So basically this door is closed under the pretext of technical error.
In conclusion, behind a modern looking digital facade there is same old ugly face of junk, non functioning and virtually dead customer service and non existent escalation mechanism.
Digibank, despite its several shortcomings(see my review of them), is much much better option, both in terms of interest rate and service.