Potential Sexual Harassment Incident at Equitas Bank

I received a call purportedly from Equitas Bank Relationship Manager on 30th August 2023 at 12.30 PM. Earlier incidents were intentionally revealing investment solicitations and hence had to be escalated and reported as Unsolicited Commercial Communication. However this time the caller was very professional and was only started asking gently about the following topics.

1. Ease of Use
2. Accessibility of Banking Service Interfaces
3. Pending Unresolved Issues/Grievances.

When the third was being discussed, seemingly another employee pulled the phone from her (RM) barging/gate crashing into the conversation and started selling about investment services and soliciting investments. During the switch a five letter slur word challenging the modesty of a female was heard to be hurled at the RM besides a chain of words indicating a few other unprofessional words demonstrating a serious misdemeanour of misogyny and giving a hint that the person could be a potential sexual predator and such persons and/or their gestures could be harmful in a safe workplace environment.

This also construes as a violation of The Vishaka Guidelines that were a set of procedural guidelines for use in India in cases of sexual harassment. They were promulgated by the Indian Supreme Court in 1997 and were superseded in 2013 by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act.

A quick note of registration the call incident have been given a heads-up to the Telecom Department via DND framework to register an incident.    A copy of the complaint would also be sent to MoWCD and Principal Nodal Officer of the financial institution in a goodwill gesture to help the organization control any traces of hostile workspace triggers in the framework.

 

An Open Letter to RBL Bank …

Subject: Distasteful Gesture of RBL Bank, Untrustworthy/No-Confidence in Customer Care Executive and Sub-Par banking standards

Message:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I understand that RBL Bank has come up from a humble and modest beginning from Kolhapur with the name as Ratnakar Bank Ltd and then rebranded itself with a global identity as RBL Bank. However of late a number of gestures from RBL Bank is considered hostile for ethical banking business. A few of them are shared with the executive team here as a goodwill gesture to investigate into a feasibility study of imparting due renaissance and reformation into the banking practices.

1. The customer care team do not seem to any bank banking knowledge. Even basic concepts like transaction dispute, chargeback etc sounds like Latin and Greek for them.
2. Time taken for credit posting to transactions is humongous and customer care team (as outlined in (1) above) is absolutely useless in pursuing the progress of the same.
3. Potential insiders in RBL bank allegedly sell customer information to unethical telemarketers for Cold Calling at odd times.
4. RBL Bank team does not seem to be aware of telecom regulations in India and/or the requirement to be statutorily compliant with the same. All it matters for them is quantitative measure of calls made and leads generated.
5. Tie-ups with third grade companies like Bajaj Finance and their group could be ruining the good historical image of RBL Bank.
6. Social Media team of RBL team does not see to be manned by live persons but half-tested buggy bots considering the type of responses and messages posted by them.
7. Even for the calls made by customer care in request to our grievances through one of the channels, the following shortcomings are observed:
   1. Communication skills of the caller is extremely dis-satisfactory.
   2. The caller keeps bombing regardless of the call preferences in a deep urge to close the service request/ticket. The objective seems to be closing the ticket within SLA quantitatively instead of qualitative measure of the response to be tendered on the grievance in question.
   3. As a quick litmus test today I just put the caller muted for a while to see how they responded with their bad communication. The call ran up to 42 minutes. Good thing is that it could have generated some revenue for the bleeding telecom provider (Vodafone) which I guess was the communication line used by the calling unit.
8. RBL Online Banking when logged on always says there is no account linked to the customer. This particularly happens when there is no active bank account and only credit card. I have been trying to get this message ringing to your team but I guess they are not interested to resolve the technical issues in the website.
9. RBL Online Banking also does not have a way to show the Unbilled Transactions (Credit and Debit) besides the current outstanding (including unbilled).

Hence on a goodwill gesture I would like to bring these shortcomings to your attention and desk.

 

Unethical business practices of Zest Money

ZestMoney seems to be a kind of Digital Money scheme that is advertising vigorously now in India. Though outwardly the offering seems to be interesting and innovative, an internal analysis of ZestMoney operations makes one feel uncomfortable with them because of their untrustworthy team.

First and foremost they try and gather contact numbers from diversified grey markets and auto creating accounts for anyone in an attempt to show a large number of customers to their investors. Then they keep sending unsolicited commercial communication. Reporting back to their customer care team on any of the channels is of no avail because all those comprise of just half tested unbaked buggy bots.

And the marketing team at ZestMoney seems to be having an aggressive preposterous audacity and temerity to dismiss complaints of UCC as Service Call or SMS. If this team is left unchecked then the current operations team at ZestMoney might be secretly siphoning public money to the coffers of antisocials precisely (latently or directly) involving in Financial Terrorism or Terror Financing.

I was just going through their assurances with Digital Lenders Association of India (DLAI) and it is just amusing that going by the past observations the match is less than 30 percent.

 

@HDFC_Bank has been steadfast pocketing 885 from supposedly a #Salary Account without valid reasons

Over the course of discussion with my sister she revealed that since 3 years she is holding a HDFC Bank Salary Account. Almost on a every month basis there are punctual debits of approximately 177 and 708 (totalling 885) but there is no proper response on the same from Customer Care who ask her to visit the branch and latter shifts the responsibility to backend team or PhoneBanking. To date the total debits have reached 21,240 and I had tried escalating the same to their social media team here.

It has only resulted in another random Service Request number being created and so far there hasn’t been any responsible revert from the financial institution. Not sure if we should trust this bank any more considering the amount of emphasis they place on #UnsolicitedCommercialCommunication, hidden charges on any services etc.

 

Customer Care in most organizations of India are no more Toll-Free contact numbers

Most of the service providers in banking and telecom in India have stopped giving Toll Free number for customer service and are either charging for agent assistance or having the agents service on the Toll number. Some of them like Citibank have customer service on 860 PREMIUM telephone line.

For example,

1. Airtel 121 Toll Free for IVR 50 paise per minute for Agent
2. Vodafone 111 -do-
3. Idea Customer Care does not exist.
4. Tata Docomo 198 Complaints number is also chargeable
5. Citibank 860 PREMIUM
6. ICICI Local

We sent a request to the office of Prime Minister vide PMOPG/E/2017/0361055 on 30th June 2017 regarding the above to take steps to ensure all service providers have a TOLL FREE 1800 number for customer service which is an international standard.

As per their response on 6th July 2017 that it is a policy matter and need to dealt by TRAI, the petition was forwarded to the following personnel in TRAI.

1. ap@trai.gov.in;
2. cp@trai.gov.in;
3. memberak@trai.gov.in;
4. ravi.rssharma76@gmail.com;
5. mamidala@ee.iitd.ac.in;
6. secretary@trai.gov.in;
7. sunil.bajpai@trai.gov.in;
8. pradvnsl@trai.gov.in;
9. skmishra@trai.gov.in;
10. sanjiv.singh@trai.gov.in;
11. advadmn@trai.gov.in;
12. advlegal@trai.gov.in;
13. sksinghal@trai.gov.in;
14. mkasim@trai.gov.in;
15. advqos@trai.gov.in;
16. advifn@trai.gov.in;
17. advmn@trai.gov.in;
18. advfea1@trai.gov.in;
19. arvindsinha59@gmail.com;
20. adv.bengaluru@trai.gov.in;
21. adv.jaipur@trai.gov.in;
22. muralighanta@gmail.com

 

Arrogant attitude of @IndiaPost staff (Anna Nagar West Extension Post Office)

Today I visited Anna Nagar Extension Post Office next to HP Petrol Bunk and Ambattur Revenue Office in order to open a savings account which I had been intending for a very long time. A few of the observations from this post office are hereunder.

1. After filling the form, they unnecessarily insisted on turning me back citing necessity of ‘Witness’ in the form. A good samaritan who was also trying to open the account volunteered to affix the witness for me.
2. When my turn came in counter, she told me no ATM card and try visiting after MAY END. What is going on? For a simple ATM card I should wait for a month and a half and even after that I should try asking them?
3. When I asked at least if I would get a passbook she told yes but only on Monday. Something was wrong, I sensed and asked are you sure it is Monday and she affirmatively replied Yes Monday. Interestingly, Monday is May Day and I think it is a federal and state holiday in India.
4. When I tried to give a 2000 rupee note to open an account with 1000 rs. she turned me again asking to get a change. Another rude behavior.
5. When I gave two 500 rupee notes she was asking me weird questions like ‘Why are you opening account here when you are in Tambaram area’ (I told my workplace is nearby and by the time I cross Tambaram the counters there would not have opened).
6. Next question she made is give the list of all NSC certificates that you have so that she need to cross verify and give the same CIF for this account. Some of my NSC is from Pune.

I don’t understand the essence of these crazy things and I can only infer if she was trying to avoid servicing the account opening request and was attempting all different ploy to achieve her goal. IndiaPost is doing a very hard work in marketing its savings account and banking business and your service is absolutely wonderful but these bad workforce are indeed spoiling the hard earned image of the department.

Response from Postal Department on 5th May 2017

 

@Dominos_India is adding duplicate service tax

During our recent dine in at a Dominos Pizza stores in the IT corridor of Chennai we found that a duplicate service tax entry is being added. Though it a zero amount the billing line items are very ambiguous. The tellers were not able to justify the same. Hence have raised this issue to Department of Sales Tax via PMO, Dominos Social Media team for their comments as well dropping a note to their corporate house.

 

@AxisBank apologizes for the derogatory comments of its official to a PgPortal complaint

A while back we took steps to report about the highly discouraging trend of Axis Bank ignoring telemarketing complaints  and also their regional operations involving in shady acts like engaging touts to threaten complainants. To this one of the official commented me as ‘The customer is a frequent complainant’. We took a strong note of the same and escalated it back to Department of Financial Services (Banking Division) and we got the response from Nodal Officer indicating that the officer who responded that comment was in fact wrong in doing so. Here are the narrations.

We hope corporates ensure their employees exericise due care of how to express themselves in public because their gestures often end up embarassing everyone.

 

Relationship Summary Requests

Whenever I get a telemarketing call from a bank they say ‘Based on your relationship status …’. At times we might be confused on what types of relationships we had/have. If it is US we can look up for a credit report and savings bank reports operated from third parties. However since CIBIL applies only to credit cards I just thought how about requesting each bank a relationship summary. I had mentioned that the summary should include all closed and active relationships hitherto. This would ensure that no PII has been inadvertently misused by telemarketers/DSA/TSA.

Request sent on 21st December 2016

Here is the status as of now:

1. Indian Bank. Got a spreadsheet from the branch in 2 days after IndCustomerFirst desk reminded the branch after a day.
2. ICICI Bank. Responded in three days with an excel sheet in the most recent email address they had on records.
3. Axis Bank. Other than an auto-responder no response yet.
4. HDFC Bank. Totally no response.
5. Standard Chartered. Borrowed ‘Additional Working Days’ two times and waiting for response.
6. Central Bank of India (After 10 Days)

   

7. Citibank. Borrowed ‘Additional Five Working Days’ today.  And after a long delay of 12 days  scribbled the below response on 2nd January 2017.
8. IndusInd Bank. Totally no response.

Can this be taken as a measurement of transparency possessed by these banking organisations?

 

@MIB_India coordinates to get a control on erring @Videocond2h

I reported the following on 21 May 2014 to Ministry of Information Broadcasting via CpGrams (MOIAB/E/2014/00554):

—-

Dear Team,

We would need you to look into some of the unethical business practices of Videocon Cable. Currently our guest house is serviced by Videocon cable. I have the following complaints on Videocon cable. Calling the customer is no use and there are no attendants at any point of time. Emailing them some junk dumbass would call you after two days but just bluntly disconnect the call and after halfa day another dumbass would appear in person just to shake the STB box up and down once and then asking 150 to 200 rs. as a visiting service charge.

The visiting person would not even have the ID card and even will not give a proper receipt of the same. The channel numbers also keep changing frequently without any proper reasoning and/or announcement. Since the caretaker of the guest house is not tech-savvy, it becomes easy for those conmen to mischievously con them.

Thanks and Regards,

Deepak

—-

Response from Bharat Business Channel of Videocon D2H on 7th April 2016 is enclosed below: