ICICI Bank - What's Customer Service?

I know, I will have to eat crow on this, still I will write the post. It was not long ago when the Indian community in Finland, were narrating their traumatic experience with regards to India’s largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank Ltd. I was the only person who stood with ICICI bank and spoke in their favour. May be my words reached ICICI, and they set to rectify the aberration. Yeah, today I speak in unison with all those harassed customers of ICICI bank.

Their first interface with the customer, i.e customer care, is actually a farce. The sole purpose of having the call center and all those Shailesh, Madhav, Ranjeeta, Vandana, etc is to keep the customer confused. They are fully trained to churn out millions of excuses (most of the time stupid ones) and ask the customer to call the next day. I once decided to test their patience and kept calling the next day. My patience ran out on 15th day. By now, I know all their excuses (and also told them to use new ones). If you think you had enough, and ask your call to be routed to their supervisor or want to escalate the matter, you will first have to cut their excuses. Finally after reaching the supervisor, you would feel the first executive was better. This time the supervisor not only will confuse, but also fudge the issue. The only time their call center was of any help to me was when I asked them to open a new account, or called them to ask the 'date' today.

All this has become routine with regards to ICICI bank, but what they did to me yesterday was the most exciting one. Yesterday, at midnight I got an email from the bank. The mail mentioned “In compliance with your request, we have dispatched a new trading password to you”. First I thought it was some phising mail, but on careful analysis, it was found to be genuine. The strangest thing is that I never requested them to reset my password and send me a new one! I tried logging in with my old password and it didn’t work. Clearly my password was changed. I was alarmed that someone changed the password and got it on my behalf. I immediately sent an email raising the suspicion of ‘fraud’ and asked them to call back as soon as they read it. As expected, I got no calls and two ‘half hour call’ to their call center during the day was of no use, excepting learning few more names.

It was only when I called the office of their DGM, Ms Satinder Kaur (nodal officer designated by RBI for customer care) thrice, they decided to do something. I got a call from someone in ICICI bank around evening. My first question was, “who asked my password to be changed, and why it was changed?” The guy answered, “We have changed your password as per instructions from government authorities”. I nearly fell off my chair and asked again to be sure, “Did the government ask you to change my password?” The guy told me the whole story. It happened that they had to de-activate my demat account, and they knew no other way to do that, except to change the password to keep me away from logging in. The guy further mentioned that government has asked them to check the accounts for proper identification and my details were missing so they had to de-activate. They chose middle of night, with no prior intimation, and de-activated my demat account.

I remember opening my account in June, 2004. At that time PAN card (Income tax card) was not necessary for opening demat account and it was not even asked. Since I already had one, I had given that along with all other documents and yet my account was de-activated on the pretext of missing PAN number. The person further mentioned to me that my account will not be activated, unless I visit their nearest branch and submit the identification documents. When I said I am in Europe, he asked me to send the documents by post. This whole thing was enough to blow my fuse.

I explained to him that I have salary account, savings account, credit card and almost all sort of accounts and since you don’t have my identification documents so first close all other accounts as well. How come one account will work without identification documents and others don’t? To this question, ICICI personnel lived up to their reputation. He accepted that I had indeed submitted those documents at the time of opening of account, but all of them were washed away in last year’s flood of Mumbai, and now government has become strict in making them keep the proper documents. This statement left me shaking with rage.

I had enough of it and decided to end the story with ICICI bank. I told the guy that if he doesn’t activate my account in next one hour then I am not going to send even a scrap of paper. They can keep my account deactivated for ages. Further, I will close all my other accounts with the bank and will also write a letter to the HR head of my employer asking, “Why they made me open my salary savings account with ICICI bank?”

I don’t know which threat was effective but it worked. In the next 15 minutes, I got three calls and they gave me a new password over phone. I checked the password, it worked, and I am able to operate the account. At the end of the day, my issue was resolved but ICICI bank really rewarded me for thinking good of them. Even if they have some valid reason, they treat their customers in a manner that just displays their utter apathy. This is not the first time but second time in last two months for me. Morever it can happen only in India that a lady(Roopalben Panchal) can have around 6000 demat accounts in her name with forged documents, can commit fraud in stock market and keep doing it. But a simple stock investor like me will have his account deactivated without prior intimation even after submitting all sort of documents.

I apologise to all with whom I disagreed on the quality of customer service of ICICI bank. Please accept this post as a formal apology.

Update - The page of ICICI in Google Finance, where the profile of ICICI and the market information of its ADR( US market) is listed, is now carrying this post in the blogger section. You can read it here. There you go ICICI, time to get your act together or the whole world reads this.