The ICICI Bank Relationship – Evolution and Fall

A quick search on the Internet on ‘ICICI Bank’ actually brings to limelight so much of disgust and mistrust that people have on this bank. At least, the following topics would prove this very much:
 
  1. ICICI Bank – A Bad Experience for many
  2. Private Banks in India — Banking for the Booty
  3. Express IT Courier and Credit Card Felony
  4. To close a bank account, it takes 15 months. That is ICICI.
 I was just thinking that I should do a little analysis into the history and bring out a small report on how was the bank performance. For the purpose of this analysis, I have considered my knowledge of the bank from 2000. It was in 2000 Feburary when I was working in 3rdAgenda (Agenda Net Marketing Private Limited), Nungambakkam. Till then our salary was given as checks and I had to encash them at my Indian Bank, T. Nagar. They started issuing bank accounts from ICICI to all employees. That was the first time, I came to know of ATM operations. I should actually thank ICICI for introducing me to new generation banking innovations like ATM, Internet Banking and Personalized Cheque Books. Frankly speaking, till I got the ICICI Salary Account from 3rdAgenda in 2001, I was simply unaware of ATM. The concept of ATM was just opening up in India at least then.
 
About September 2001, I moved to Chrysolite Enterprises Private Limited in Alwarpet. I still continued using my ICICI bank account. Now they also had a good ATM in the nearby petrol bunk. The then ATM support desk at ICICI Bank (atm@icicibank.com) was also very helpful. I remember sending one suggestion/report to them regarding the slanted PIN panel in the Alwarpet ATM which brought in the following (security) issues:
 
  1. Inconvenience of entering the PIN number
  2. The outsider can just peep at what you are entering.

They were even responsive and after a while, this PIN panel was also replaced them. The negative experience with ICICI was also slowly cropping up. ICICI Bank, Cenotaph Road representative squeezed on us salary accounts even though the Chrysolite Management was not willing to credit salaries to it. They outright told that it is upto the employees to open the salary account but the management would continue disbursing the salary by pay cheques only. Because of the small team and the marketing guy’s incessant trouble, I opened another ICICI Bank account but just a week after, I just felt it was waste and hence closed it outright. :)

 

Time went on. I had a brief tour to New Delhi in May 2002 on a client site assignment at GECIS, Gurgaon. I should say my ICICI account was rather helpful at New Delhi on account of the following reasons:

 

  1. Being a contract employee for Sakshi Automation Solutions, I need not open a separate account and they were happy to credit the pay to my existing ICICI account.
  2. This was the first time, I have been travelling a few miles across from my hometown (Chennai) and hence a quick money source was the ATM card.

After the contract assignment, when I returned to Chennai, I had other assignments with organizations here. I have anyway explained about the ICICI Bank relationship from then on over the four points in the start of this report. I have a few points over ICICI Bank relationship:

 

  1. No doubt they are trying to be very innovative in banking products but the problem is that currently to achieve cost cutting and economical operations, they have outsourced most of the banking operations to low-profile staff all over the country. You can see how mean and baseless was Adyar Branch Manager’s reply in (2) above.
  2. Since the branch staff are low profile, they also outsource the collection tasks to goondas flouting the laws of land and hence all over the country, the law and order terribly breaks down because of this bank.
  3. In an aggressive marketing spree, they have commissioned so many telemarketers to sell their banking products. But the chosen telemarketers are just headed towards getting more commission. They hence flout the laws of land particularly the NDNC. Inspite of registering to all NDNCs in India, you would still get telemarketing calls for sure and a good chunk of 75% of them would be from ICICI group.

How to tackle this menace?

 You ought to be persistent and report each and every issue to Central Processing Unit of ICICI Bank. They have three channels. Remember it is a very slow process. Sometimes, the ICICI Customer Care sends gibberish crap responses and pretend as if they don’t understand your query or complaint at all. If you encounter such a situation, escalate to Head Service Quality.

 I believe, the ICICI Management has to take some real pains to bring a sea change in its operations to alleviate the entire depth of carcinogenic maladies that has infected throughout the organization.