‘Harassing’ is the word I would use, if I had to describe it in one word.

I have been banking with ICICI in India for a long time and have been one of the loyal happy customers, till NOW. This picture has changed drastically in the last one month.

I recently moved to Chennai and so am yet to have all banking addresses point to Chennai. I guessed that would not be much of an issue with online banking options. I was wrong. There are two points that I am trying to make here with respect to banking in general in India and ICICI in particular.

First - online banking is yet to arrive in true terms. ICICI offers lot of online banking options, but these are NOT stable (to say the least). You are left guessing whether a transaction will go through or not esp, if it involves any other vendors. Mind you, its not my internet connection that has an issue. The bank takes few seconds to debit money from your account even for a void transaction, but takes at least 8 working days to reverse the transaction! Good luck.

Second - customer service is pathetic to say the least. For a failed transaction on my credit card, I tried to raise a complain/ticket/request with ICICI. The customer service rep refused to take my complaint. Whats more - on escalation, I found that three different timelines were given to me. Helpdesk said call back after a day, customer service manager said call back after three days and online complaint response manager asked me to followup after 21 days !!! And yes, I am expected to pay up if the amount shows up in my bill.

The latest irritant has been ‘our application servers are down we can’t take your request right now, pls call back later’. Well, why are you sitting at helpdesk if its a ‘help less desk’. Come on, get your infrastructure in place, don’t add new customers if you can’t handle! Sorry, we need to grow, grow like crazy…so what if you are unhappy; we add new clients everyday who will take a while to figure out that we are pathetic at customer service.

And ICICI Prudential site is sooo slow, that you can new use it.

Well, that’s the sounding board on banking. And ICICI seems to be leading the efforts on making its customers cry. Yes, I speak for myself when I say that.