Customer Feedback – SBI Best Practice

Couple of months ago I was at a conference organized by Conscious Capitalism Institute in Mumbai. Easily the best session was by Mr. O.P.Bhatt the chairman of the State Bank of India. The man being credited with turning around the giant public sector enterprise. He spoke in depth about the “Parivartan” (meaning “change”) program which touched every single employee at the bank. The strategic initiatives of getting their basics right are obviously visible with the bank’s stock performing much better than the market.

There are a couple of things that he said I would like to highlight before talking about the SBI case. One was the initiative to sensitize the staff of the bank that the average customer who has a savings bank account with Rs.5000 balance or a Rs.50000 fixed deposit, its lakhs of these average customers who provide the bank with required cash to conduct its earning ways. The other was about Parivartan2, a program to help the employees of SBI find purpose in their job.

To see SBI and its functionality for myself, few weeks ago I stepped into a newly opened branch in Hyderabad. Quite expectedly I had to move from one counter to another to another in a small branch of 6-7 employees to open a savings bank account. Finally the assistant branch manager gave me a form and thats all he could do. He couldn’t tell me about the features of the account, detail forget selling it to me. Obviously disappointed with I began to walk out while i noticed a print-out stuck on the wall which read “If not satisfied with our service please SMS “UNHAPPY” to 8008202020 I immediately messaged UNHAPPY to that number, not expecting much from a Govt. run bank.

Much to my surprise I got a call from the local head office enquiring about my grievance. Once I explained to them what had happened, the assistant branch manager called me to ask me why I complained. I tried to reason that I was present in the capacity of a customer and was to be treated like one, not as a burden. Thoroughly disappointed by their rather rude behavior again I text messaged UNHAPPY.

Within half an hour I received a call from the branch manager politely enquiring about the incident. After giving me a patient hearing, he apologized and invited me to pay a visit again to the branch the next week with in which period he wanted to “counsel” his staff about behaving better with customers. Not convinced by his explanation (which I truly thought was very appropriate) I said I required to open an account immediately and couldn’t wait for his improvement of service and that I needed to choose my banker soon. He immediately as a gesture offered to personally come down to my office, take the required documents and open my account.

This was an excellent experience but it didn’t end there. Couple of days back I received another call from the Local head office enquiring about the status of my complaint, if it had been resolved, if I needed to escalate it etc. This follow up was again impressive.

The entire experience left me spell bound. A Govt. Run enterprise, with supposed red tape, with one of the strongest banking employee unions was able to deliver this kind of service. First round of applause for the bold initiative to take up asking customers to complain at will through a simple text message. Second round of applause to the branch manager, who would be a fairly senior officer, dealing with smallest of customers (just a savings bank account with a minimum balance of Rs.1000), carefully treading the path of managing his staff who would be protected by very strong labor laws & unions by not taking action but by “counseling” them. Third applause for following up and making sure the grievance is being attended to.

Since the experience my respect for the banking giant, SBI, has grown a notch higher. It makes me wonder what stops every business in the service industry from putting in place such a strong feedback system. It is more than worth investing in feedback from customers. If an elephant like SBI can do it, so can everyone else. Looking forward to my clients of the service industry implementing such robust feedback mechanisms and that this fever spreads across the world. Businesses which are not customer centric will have to fade away into oblivion.

UPDATE: SMS UNHAPPY has been nominated for eIndia mGovernance initiative of the Year Award. It is being implemented across 1100 SBI branches in AP serving over 14 million customers. In 6 months they have received 11000 complaints and have resolved 96% of them. ISB has taken up the project as a case study and is likely to implement it as part of course curriculum. Read more. Vote for SMS UNHAPPY.