Thikkuvay Thandavarayan

Sometime last week, I needed to talk to ICICI PhoneBanking regarding irregular statement dispatch and other issues with respect to the credit card. Time and again it had been regular humor series novel in negotiating with ICICI PhoneBanking. There are umpty number of faulty phone banking services and I think ICICI is more competing towards staging a number one comedy show through its Phone Banking Unit. Whenever you send a feedback to ICICI either to customer.care@icicibank.com or head.servicequality@icicibank.com, the only reply you can ever expect to get is ‘Thank you for your feedback. We are always eager to raise the bars of our services to a greater level’. But in reality, the level of customer acceptance of the services seems to be always going down and the most signficant drawback is the Phone Banking Unit.

I talked to a guy and he seemed to have a Oriyan accent. Almost I could’nt make out one word of what he was telling. I really wonder how such local accent-powered guys get on to phonebanking. With CallCenter training institutes so much emphasizing on Accent Neutralisation, to favor a global communication standards, this came out indeed as a distinct shock.

Well! The caption of this post, to illustrate this, is rather a misnomer and intended to convey the drawbacks of PhoneBanking and to use a humor vehicle to carry it on a very lighter tone.  The real meaning of the caption and how it befits their service standards is described below.

The Phone Banking guy actually did’nt stutter nor he seems to have any stammering weakness but the only thing is that his adamant attitude to the local language accent and his stubbornness in not making his client comfortable and he seemed to have taken resort of his accent to shoo shoo the customers away.  This had been a recurring issue with ICICI PhoneBanking executives. The following are some of the standard responses that you can expect to get.

  1. “I am sorry I can not hear you. ” (even after you shout. This typically occurs when there is a conflict of interest which you want them to record. One type of excuse that they deploy to momentarily escape the wrath of the consumer).

  2. “Our systems are under routine maintanence. Please call us back after one hour”.

  3. “I am transferring you to another officer.” (Hold music starts). If he is transferring to another officer, who does the similar joke, then what is he then?

A friendly note: Ensure that you never call ICICI PhoneBanking over any long distance or roaming lines. You ought to spend a minimum of twenty minutes to even get a simple query answered by the Phone Banking executives.

It is high time that ICICI Bank brings some disciplince, accent neutralization, global accessibility of the staff and consumer’s money, a relative and easier degree of transparency of its processes to the consumer else I think, Reserve Bank of India should consider some moratorium on it on account of bad business practices.

Other salient features of ICICI Bank and bad business practices:

  1. Banking for the Booty

  2. Record Number of Complaints against ICICI

Caption Explanation In Tamil, if ‘Thikkuvay’ normally stands for unintelligible speech normally driven out of stammering or stuttering weakness.  ‘Thandavarayan’ is an indicative name similar to ‘Paul or Peter’ (in English) like in the proverb “Do not rob peter to pay paul”. If you really want an English version of the caption, readers, feel free to suggest one. Put your thinking caps on. Something to start with.

  1. Indian English Caption: Stuttering Sivakumaran

  2. Western English: Stammering Samuel

The bottomline rule of the ‘Rhyme the Name’ caption contest is that it should be rhyming.

Disclaimer: The names and/or the contest is purely for entertainment purpose only. Real Tangible Physical mapping of the name to any actual physical entities or creatures is accidental or coincidental. The contest is made on good samaritan gesture to make a bit of humour, while conveying the acute financial scam by leading private sector bank.