- Editor's View
- 3 min read
Why are you so cluttered?
In his 30-minute talk, Rajesh Bansal, CEO, RBI Innovation Hub highlighted various aspects of customer service. He questioned, is the BFSI sector listening to the customer? And cited many examples of how banks are not focused on customer issues and grievances.
Before I explain the headline to you, let me share something that a friend told me today. He lives in a Mumbai suburb and went to deposit cash at a nearby branch of a leading private bank. It was a digital branch and they didn't have a teller, so he couldn't deposit it. He then went to another branch in the same vicinity but there was a long queue of customers at a teller counter waiting to deposit cash. The young teller was sweating.
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In his 30-minute talk, Bansal highlighted various aspects of customer service. He questioned, is the BFSI sector listening to the customer? And cited many examples of how banks are not focused on customer issues and grievances.
Bansal said most of the apps either by FinTechs or banks are cluttered. Several do not even offer any option for customers to call the service centre.
He would rate such apps on the 3-4 level out of 10, he said. He asked, is there a dearth of UI & UX talent?.. or is it because there is less focus on the customer? He said banks should take a cue from the famous music app Spotify. I am sharing the story that we wrote.
Bansal was not delivering just a sermon. He has worked on projects to make banking processes easier. He transformed the Kisan Credit. It takes 4 weeks for farmers to take loans, but the RBI Innovation Hub pilot in two states has reduced the turnaround time drastically to one day now.
Customer complaints
Customers have no options, my friend whom I have mentioned above spent more than half a day just to deposit cash. Customer complaints over the years in the banking space have increased. The Banking Ombudsman received 3,03,107 complaints last year, up 22.27 per cent compared to last year.
While BFSI companies are aggressively adopting digital they should not eliminate their existing services completely in the name of digital. They should have a huge number of case studies before implementing a large digital solution. Let's not have digital-only banks for the namesake. And it's not going to be really tricky. Because on one side, banks have to think about the future as the millennials and GenZ are tech savvy but on the other side, there is another set of the population which is not digitally savvy.
This week, there were two major developments in the BFSI space. The RBI's guidelines on digital lending became effective from December 1. The RBI this week launched the awaited pilot of retail CBDC.
This week we interviewed Rahul Kothari, CBO of Razorpay for FinTech Diary and ETBFSI Explainer had all the details about NEFT, RTGS and IMPS payment systems. We also had an exclusive interview with Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi. He said along with the Internet of Things, we should also have the Internet of Responsibilities.
The idea behind sharing my views and observations is to support the whole ecosystem, as I understand the right feedback should reach the right people. I am planning to send ETBFSI Digest every week from next Friday. Do let me know what you think about it.
If you have any thoughts or feedback, please feel free to share them with me at amol.dethe@timesinternet.in.