Customer Is King

In the race to increase customers and balance sheet size, banks and NBFCs can't ignore service quality

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Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra has a good reason to worry about the quality of customer service at Indian banks. The number of complaints under the RBI's Integrated Ombudsman Scheme has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 50% over the past two years. Worse, 57% of the maintainable complaints last year required mediation or formal intervention by the RBI ombudsmen. No wonder, the governor had to remind bankers at a recent event that it's not fair to treat customer complaints as a nuisance. The number of complaints could actually be much higher because there is a large section of people who don't have the wherewithal or aren't even aware of the processes to make complaints — something that the regulator, along with the industry, needs to address urgently.