Less for more?

Kaps says he is pinned down by all the pins from the his bank and it is troublesome to do small things like transfers. Well! That sounds like something that happened to me!

Did you ever get a minor exception from a credid card company? Why talk about exceptions? Have you got anything done before you called them umpteen number of times?

Talk about all the money that cr card companies sink into to their systems. What has the customer got out of the technology investments? If all activity in a bank is to serve the customer, should these investments not benefit the consumer? Is it good sense to make investments that don’t result in savings for a customer?

Rama Bijapurkar wrote in the ET that technology investments yield more to the corporates than to the consumers. Can’t agree more… having gone through the rigma roll of calling up the credit card companies! You deviate a little and it takes for ever to close your request because systems are designed to address the 90% of the transactions that form 10% of the “categories” of transactions. The rest of the transactions are eternally waiting for the next udpate!

Sure some metrics that the companies track improved and yes the company has been able to “pool” the capacity. But customers are worse-off. Some costs are even transferred to the customer. For example, Internet banking – who does the data entry for the bank? When you call a bank, who incurs the cost of calling? Banks have thrusted on consumers a part of transitioning. And that is big for each individual (example, you have to go to the bank to register yourself. That takes anywhere between 15 min to 45 min!) Obviously, if you don’t transact a lot, you are in the red because you invest your time and reap the benefits over a period of time. The cost (time or money) of ‘setting-up’ the infrastructure for one or few transactions is more than the benefit that accrues to us.

No matter what I said above, if the banker banker is customer centric, she will be able to get it’s act together. It shows up over a period of time! (e.g. Honda started installing cup holders in a car and that model became popular becuase of that! Another one…do you have a Honda vehicle? Look at how easy it is to slide the key into your key ring) If she is not, she can never get it right because ‘decision makers’ in the organization don’t usually get a raw deal. Customers cant “tell” the company because they can’t talk to someone else when things go bad (if you can’t get stuff done through telephone banking, can you talk to higher-ups?). So the customer “service” executives act as “customer repellants.” What is surprising is that most bankers, across the country, or probably across the world, are on the same boat. They play the “chavatayanu nenu, neekante pedda chavatayanu nenu” (I am a fool, I am a bigger fool than you) game.

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