Skip to main content

ICICI and I


My association with the ICICI Bank goes back by about twenty years when I opened my account at their Saket branch in Delhi. The first thing that struck me about the bank was the suave and deferential ways of the staff which was a stark contrast to what I was used to in the other two banks which I was compelled to associate myself with. The Punjab National Bank which had my salary account was an utter disaster with its rude and listless staff. The State Bank of India which held my PPF account was the pinnacle of inefficiecy. ICICI came as a pleasant and welcome contrast. However, that bank too underwent an evolution in the wrong direction as time went. When the number of clients rose and the workload became heavy, the gentleness of the staff was the first casualty. Nevertheless, the bank remained far superior to the other two.

When I shifted to Kerala I transferred my account to the branch in my hometown. Here the staff were exquisite. But I hardly had to visit the branch because I had learnt to do most things online. I must say that the bank’s online services are excellent too.

My romance with ICICI is coming to an end, however. The reason is that one rude and semiliterate staff member sitting in Mumbai blocked my email id for raising a genuine grievance. I wanted to redeem my credit card’s reward points which had crossed 4000. I wanted to redeem those points for the Rs1000 gift voucher of Amazon as I always did. But then my reward points had vanished into thin air. I asked an officer of my branch and was told that the bank was changing the reward point system and it would take a while to rectify certain errors. I was asked to wait. I waited for two months and nothing seemed to be happening. So I sent an email to the customer care department.

The response baffled me. On the one hand, it said that ICICI had closed its partnership with Payback on 31 March 2022. On the other hand, it asked me to redeem my reward points from Payback and gave me a link which of course was meaningless because Payback had no more business with ICICI. And absurdly the mail said, “Currently we are unable to check your available payback points also.”

I sent another mail asking them to cancel my credit card if they couldn’t help me with a simple grievance. If they had told me honestly that I lost my reward points because of their sheer inefficiency I would have accepted the honesty as well as inefficiency. But I didn’t like their prevarication. So I sent my third mail in which I told them explicitly to cancel my card. Then they blocked me! 


I have decided to end my association with ICICI Bank altogether. There are just a couple of services which are linked to my ICICI account. As soon as I manage to change those links, I will say goodbye to ICICI. I don’t wish to bank on a bank that blocks a client who has a genuine grievance.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJune 24, 2022 at 12:08 AM

    Hari OM
    Fair enough, too! I find service standards in general are poor in these areas. They seem to forget whose money is whose! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 24, 2022 at 6:37 AM

      One thing I have noticed is that in the banks in Kerala people are better-behaved. I have noticed it in many banks including SBI.

      Delete
    2. ShilpaSeptember 5, 2022 at 12:23 AM

      This is true

      Delete
  2. AnonymousJune 24, 2022 at 3:11 PM

    People believe in smartness opposed to goodness in the North. Tamil Nadu ICICI - we had a recent rendezvous. No issues as such. We had a sweet and smiling young chap opening our FD. Should wait and see. D n D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 24, 2022 at 4:07 PM

      There's a huge difference between the way staff behave in the 2 regions. True.

      Delete
  3. BoomikaOctober 27, 2022 at 11:26 AM

    Wow so nice Amazing post, thanks for sharing this article. manufacturing company in chennai

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more