JK's Diary

Caveat: This post is only to educate the people on the quality, standard of processes and customer care one can expect with Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) in India. This post in no way is aimed at driving the existing customers or potential customers away from having a relationship with SCB. Everything stated in this post is backed by various reference numbers that could be verified with SCB and purely based on my experience.

Background:

• Relationship with SCB: January 2013 to February 2014
• Purpose: Home Loan
• Time taken to close home loan: 27^th November, 2013 to 6^th February, 2014
• No. of reference numbers/complaints/callback requests raised: 18+
• No. of calls to SCB customer care: 35+ calls covering over 270+ minutes in just over 2 months

This post is divided into sections detailing what one can expect at various stages of interaction with SCB. Though the relationship with SCB started with the purpose of having a home loan, I was also sold a top-up loan under the name of liability insurance and a SCB “Preferred Banking” credit card.

Reason for closure of loan – Sudden surge in Interest rate!

SCB raised my interest rate directly from 10.15% to 10.9% while every other bank including HDFC and ICICI was way below this number. When asked to reconsider my interest rate, they gave me 10.39% (same rate offered to customers taking new loans) provided I pay about 11K as processing fee. Points to note:

• This processing fee comes at a time when RBI is working on removing it completely and other banks are waiving off quoting an offer or some such thing
• If you do the math to breakeven (assuming you paid the 11K processing fee), you will need an absolute minimum of 6 months in the case of my loan

Not sure if SCB thinks that its customers are mostly dumb or too rich and that they can get away with these things.

Sales Team:

The sales person like in any other private bank was good in selling their products. They also make verbal promises. As a customer or potential customer, what you should be aware:

1. Get everything in written or mailed to you from their official mail ID
   • Without this anything you say at the branch or to their call center team has no validity and will not be entertained
   • Proof: A verbal promise that pre-payment cheques will be collected from you at your office or residence is possible only with that letter. When the time came and I reached out to them, the response was, “Sir, you need to go to the branch and give the cheque. There is a form you need to fill.” When asked about the promise of having them collected and so on, “Sorry sir, you will have to go to the Koramangala branch only.” Sales staffs name: Bharathi.
2. Get the process for closure of loan or any service you want clearly explained and documented (specific to your loan/request)
   
   • Without this be ready for surprises in terms of last-minute delays, new processes being explained from time-to-time, etc.
   • This applies mostly around the time when they try to up-sell and cross-sell. Example: credit card and insurance
   • It is common to hear about new policies and/or charges introduced by SCB just about the time when you thought everything is done
3. Do not let the sales person force you to take a liability insurance and treat it as a Top-up loan
   • Liability insurance (sold by their staff Pankaj) being treated as a top-up loan is good for the agent as it helps them meet their targets. However, this leads to complications when it comes to closing of loan
   • Though you were told it is only liability insurance, you the customer should know that the sales person treated it as a top-up loan and complicated things. Now you have actually got two loans in hand
   • Assurance that they will help you at the time of closing the loan is no use as when you call them, they will tell you to call the customer care and follow it up with them
   • Showing liability insurance as a top-up loan and tying it to the primary home loan, will now need you, the customer to be cautious and closing each one of them manually by raising a request
   • SCB systems are not advanced enough to show all the details on the customer care reps. Screen so it is “always” your fault and not the banks fault
4. Registration amount must be clarified before going to sub-registrar’s office
   • This is the first bank where the bank tells the customer how to do fraud and save money
   • Proof: During registration of my property at sub-registrars’ office, the sales person had already assumed that I will register the property at a lower rate (not at the actual rate I bought the property at) and prepared the documents accordingly. In addition, all documents related to the loan were dispatched to SCBs Central Processing Unit in Chennai. Now I was being told by the agent to go ahead with the registration at a lower rate as it is beneficial to me (in terms of saving money). When I insisted on registering the property at the actual rate I bought, I was told it is not possible to bring the documents back from Chennai. We had to request them to connect us to the regional manager so we can escalate and only then did they bring the documents back and register the property at actual rate

At the branch:

During my handful of visits to the Koramangala branch in Bangalore, I observed that only two service desks will be open at any instant of time to handle all kinds of requests. Even if there are 10 customers waiting to be served, and other staffs are either freely roaming around or sitting in their cabins, no extra counter will be opened.

SCB Systems & Process Quality:

1. SCB systems seem to be a little primitive as most of the time you will hear the customer care say that they need a minute to pull up your details on their screen as the system is slow or they need to transfer the call to someone else as their system hanged
   • Proof: Please ask SCB to give all call transcripts and you can confirm this
2. SCB systems cannot show all details related to a customer
   • Proof: Even after closing of my credit card, and informing the representatives that I no longer hold a SCB card, offers like a pre-approved loan on the SCB credit card issued to me  were being repeated by the customer care
   • When a request is made to the customer care team to close a loan, you have to explicitly specify each loan number. Mentioning the primary loan account and informing the customer rep. to close everything related to it will not help. Informing that you will ultimately need the original documents back and they need to do everything related to the closing of loan will also not help. This is because the system does not show the same
   • Proof: Even at the branch, when I gave the final cheque and asked whether everything is done from my end and I will get the original documents, the person at the branch checked his screen and confirmed, “Yes Sir. It’s all done. You will get an SMS within 7 working days. Once you get that, you can fix an appointment and collect the docs.”
3. Managing of workflows in SCB is a manual process
   • Proof: When a staff says, “they are marking your case on priority” it only means they wrote down, “high priority” in notes and the respective teams has to manually look into it. This is one of the reasons why I had to raise many complaint requests after SLA expired
   • Proof: If the EMI date falls close to the date in PTQ (Pre-closure letter), rest assured your wait is going to be longer. The team does not like to manually intervene and stop the EMI or change the workflow to have things processed fast
4. Courier of documents from Chennai to Bangalore can take up to 15 working days
   • Normal process: You will get an SMS once the documents have been dispatched from Chennai. This SMS will say you can call the branch and take an appointment to collect the docs. As per the SMS when you call, you will be given a date that is 3 days from the date of your call to collect documents
   • Your bad luck process: SMS will say you can call the branch and take an appointment to collect the docs. As per the SMS when you call, if the customer rep does not know about this three-day thing he/she will tell you to call after 3 days and book an appointment. When you do so after 3 working days, the customer rep who might have a slightly better experience than the previous rep you spoke to, will say, “Sir, you can only get an appointment after 3 working days!” This is how SCB drives you nuts!

Retention Team:

If the amount of loan for closure is high (not sure what is high for SCB) or low (25K for my liability insurance), the request will be kept on hold for a longer time before approval.

• Even for the closure of liability insurance (top-up loan), the retention team has to approve
• Even if you are ready to continue the liability insurance with SCB, their process says I cannot if I want the original documents linked to the primary loan

The above is a good example to show how their systems are designed to drive customers away. I had to pay a small penalty on the liability insurance because of SCBs great process. Wish I can go to the court and make SCB pay the penalty for their pathetic systems and processes.

Customer Care:

The team will often use these lines:

Now here is the funny part, one day I asked them what is EOD for SCB? Is it 4pm, 5pm? And they had absolutely no clue what End of day is. They are just told to say, “End of day”. If you call after 6pm, they will tell you, “…everyone has left for the day and someone will get back to you by tomorrow positively”.

1. Only way to make them call you is to place a call back request and hope to get a call back the following day. Note: If you do not get a callback within 24hrs and you call the customer care, the call back request will be treated as complete and will be closed
   • Proof: My conversation with Moni in Escalations team is proof of the same. She was hell-bent on closing a callback request whose SLA was expiring their “EOD”. No request to keep the callback request open will be entertained. You can call the team after sometime and be rest assured that the call back request was closed
2. The team has the freedom to raise as many tickets (Reference numbers) as they please. This is because every ticket they give you buys them time
   • Proof: Number of requests I have raised in the just 2 months
3. Toll free number will connect you randomly to either their Chennai office or the Bangalore office based on availability. So a promise made by a floor manager/supervisor/team lead in one office cannot be followed by his/her counterpart in another office. There is no facility to route the call to the other office or get information for you. You the customer has to place a call back request and wait 24 hours for a reply.
   • Other option is to keep calling or keep your fingers crossed to get connected to the branch you want and hope the person is in office. Some people like supervisor, Mr. Manjunath comes to office only at 12 noon (he himself said this) and will not be available after 6pm
4. Any promise of personal follow-up from SCB is useless as you still have to call them and remind them
   • Proof: My interaction with Mr. Manjunath R and Miss. Arthy Jaganathan

Credit card:

This is one of the most notorious cards I have seen till date.

1. Ensure the free credit card given to you is used at least 4 times within the first 3 months period or so. Else you will be levied a charge of Rs.250/- for non-usage
2. Want to talk to their customer care more than two times in a month? Be ready to flush Rs.50/- per call from the 3^rd call you make
3. Redeem all your points – get the gifts – wait for the statement to get generated – pay the outstanding amount and place a request for closure of card. Theoretically, after 7 working days, the card is closed. But SCBs systems are so good, that the redemption fee of Rs. 111.24/- can appear after 2 months. Now that your card is closed, the only way to make the payment is, you the customer must take the pain of either going to the bank or an ATM with a cheque. Wow!
4. By the way, when asked about this to the customer care, they do not accept it is their fault, they still hold you responsible. If this amount came up after 6 months, you still owe the bank. The bank is not responsible for you having closed the card long back

CEO’s office:

I was so pissed off with the customer care team that I decided to let the CEO India & South Asia Operations, Mr. Sunil Kaushal know about the service quality so others don’t have to suffer like me. Guess what!

• Not even a courtesy acknowledgement mail from CEOs office. Nice email etiquette for a British multinational banking and financial services company
• First time I mailed about the quality of loan process, second time it was about the quality of credit card process. In this mail, I requested indirectly for a courtesy acknowledgement. So the mail was forwarded to the same team I was interacting with and they acknowledged receiving the mail

Conclusion:

If you choose SCB, be ready to face some or all of this. If you found reading this long post was pain, you can understand how much pain I was put through by this bank in just 2 months.

***Will post the typical process flow for loan closure in SCB shortly.