Banks going downhill

This is a period of development in Indian banking activity. The positive side includes growth in the number of branches, significant increases in the number of users, growth in volume of business, and the use of information technology.

I write about the negative side, involving poor management and poor customer care. I hope that managers in banking, as well as other sectors, will read the comments here and introduce improvements wherever they can.

1)      The integrity of a bank needs to be recovered. If you go with a problem to the bank, they may contact other resources, but should solve your problems. Instead, they now tell you to call their customer care number. Many activities have been outsourced. The branch staff are there mainly to point you to some phone number to call or to use some website to solve your problems.

2)      The bank itself needs to adequately understand technology, let alone the tiny companies that handle outsourced tasks.  A branch of one big bank has removed PCs from staff members' desks. Staff who used to provide good customer care have been posted out, presumably to handle new branches. Untrained staff or interns try to handle customer care using their cell phones. They usually try to call their customer service centers.

3)      Cellphone signals are poor inside the branch office, and hence Internet connectivity is poor. So the staff often go out the office door to use their cell phones. The PCs would have given them LAN connectivity.

4)      It is common for customer care numbers shown on websites to be wrong. Customer care centers sometimes give me the wrong phone numbers to get something done.

5)      I have had customer care numbers tell me I am 51 on the waiting list. Voice response systems are not meant to keep callers hanging for 30 minutes or more! Such systems should have adequate capacity to respond to customers in five minutes or less.

6)      No one seems to audit how many customers who try to carry out tasks on the bank’s websites drop out in desperation because the site is not user-friendly.

B      Many bank websites do not work correctly. If you complain, the bank asks you to use their cell phone apps based on more up-to-date technology. Why don't the banks have their websites tell you to use a cell phone app instead of asking you to log in and suffer the confusion caused by obsolete technology?  

Srinivasan Ramani