The Personal Touch

What distinguishes one bank from another, is the nature of services offered, says Rajendra Palande

Here’s a taste of service in the early 1990s: A customer was rebuffed by a bank manager for opening an account in the Connaught Place branch, New Delhi (he had a small business unit in the area) and had come from a fairly distant location at Sadar Bazar.

Cut to 2005: Juhi Srivastava, a relationship manager with UTI Bank, spent a day at a Mumbai hospital last month looking after a customer who underwent a cataract surgery. This was Srivastava’s call of duty as the idea was to meet the “beyond banking” needs of senior citizens who are customers of its priority banking offerings. A vast change in scenario from the times when public sector banks (PSBs) ruled the roost.

Even though PSBs account for three-fourth of the banking industry’s assets, mercifully, the rules of the game have changed with the arrival of new private banks. PSBs are now no longer dependent on walk-in business.

For instance, Punjab National Bank (PNB) executives now chase the customers they once shunned and offer them services. PNB now has a separate group of employees who move out from the cosy confines of their offices to get the business of collecting income tax challans.

PNB is not alone in this race of customer acquisition and retention. Most of the PSBs are setting up exclusive marketing units, hiring executives directly from the market and offering them market-related pay packets.

“The arrival of private sector banks brought in a sea-change in the mindset of public sector bankers. In the last three-four years, there’s a scientific basis for customer services initiatives taken by banks. Customer today is aware and sensitised, and keenly watches whether we are really walking the talk,” points out Manju Srivatsa, senior vice-president, UTI Bank. A far cry from the times when a teller would keep a prime customer waiting for a longer period just because the branch manager had asked for faster transaction on behalf of the customer.

Reinforcing the change, ICICI Bank diligently carries out ‘Moments Of Truth’ survey to capture the kind of experience a customer goes through at a branch, soon after his/her transaction is over.

	‘We need to learn from various industries – adopt practices of the service industry on how to deal with customers’	“We need to learn from various industries – adopt practices of the service industry on how to deal with customers and adapt processes from the manufacturing industry to improve efficiencies,” says Chanda Kochhar, executive director, ICICI Bank. ICICI has imported processes for cheque clearing from the shop floor of a manufacturing entity.
Chanda Kochhar, Executive Director, ICICI Bank

It equates its cheque clearing operation with the shop floor of a manufacturing unit. It processes four lakh cheques in just a few hours every day.

“Service excellence is a journey and not a destination. We try and do our best, and if some things go wrong then we look at a complaint as an opportunity,” says Nicholas G Winsor, head-personal financial services, HSBC.

What Winsor means is that a positive attitude in treating complaints actually generates loyalty in the customer. This constant endeavour to better customer experiences has prompted it to go ahead with a pilot run with cheque deposit machines at its Mumbai main branch. With this, a customer can get a scanned version of the cheque which serves as an acknowledgment.	‘Service excellence is a journey and not a destination’
	Nicholas G Winsor, Head-Personal Financial Services, HSBC

“It’s important that our efforts to deliver quality service are underpinned by investments in infrastructure,” he says.

To prevent crowding at certain counters, ICICI Bank’s has introduced a system of token for all services at its 200 branches. This was done after training its counter executives in multi-tasking. The bank conducts a customer service survey once in two weeks and provides branch managers with periodical feedback. It has set up a customer service council headed by the executive director to redress complaints.

‘Mystery shopping,’ by HSBC, tracks its service delivery across all major customer touchpoints. This provides management of each branch and call centres with a set of actionable feedback on how they stack up against the internal goals. “Negative feedback at HSBC is relatively low, but we cannot be complacent. We have to keep striving for bettering customer experience all the time,” says Winsor.

In fact, the earlier instance of a UTI bank officer sitting through the cataract surgery of a customer, is not an isolated example. Srivatsa claims that there is another instance of the bank taking care of senior citizen staying in the Lokhandwala Complex in a western suburb of Mumbai. Due to an accident, the elderly client could not move out of his house, but needed to withdraw money from his account at regular intervals.

The bank did not only chip in to deliver cash at his door-step, but also provided him with bank statements. And when the customer wasn’t sure if the statements reflected the true state of his account, the relationship managers at the branch arranged to bring the senior citizen to the branch on a wheel-chair and convinced him of the veracity of statements provided.

The products offered by competing banks are similar. The core differentiators are the brand and the nature of services provided. Most bankers said a lot of effort goes into ensuring service quality. The challenge is whether they are able to offer customer a fair and transparent system.

Meanwhile, PNB has installed closed-circuit cameras at its key branches. As it dwelled on customer service, it started using the CC-TV as an aid for bettering customer experience. The branch heads monitor the situation at counters and, in the event of overcrowding, get to act immediately to put additional staff at work at the counters to clear the rush. Its renovated branches now have cash counters that resemble reception desks.

And, of course, what’s egging on the race is competition. “The public sector banks are faced with declining spreads and a dearth of deposits because of various options offering higher returns. Also, there’s fight for lending and also for deposits. We are now trying to cater to customers’ financial needs and advise on investments in insurance and mutual funds. The reason is simple: If we don’t do it, someone else will,” says Sidhu.•