Are you in their league?. Review on Citibank

I have been a customer of Citibank India(Suvidha account) for well over five years. I opened the account for parking my monthly salary. At that time, I found the bank better in terms of customer service and also superior in terms of its online banking experience. Five years later though, I wonder if Citibank is a good choice for retail customers. The service has deteriorated significantly. Their relationship managers chase you to get an investment commitment out of you, and that's the only attention you will receive from the bank, unless perhaps you're on the upper end of the HNI bracket with more than a few lakhs in your account.(I wouldn't know for certain though, my balance never exceeded 10 lakhs, but I would speculate that if your relationship with them is worth a lot more, they will treat you with more respect).

I have had several problems with them in the last one year. They messed up the re-issue of my upgraded credit card. Blunders on their side led to two cards being issued instead of one. They missed billing me for some trasnacations when transferring the old card's transactions to the new one, and when they did realize their blunder and bill me for them TWO months later, they failed to clearly explain to me what was going on("technical glitch" is the annoying officialese they use, not, "this is where we screwed up, sorry for that".) I had to wade through several card statements to figure out for myself what the issue was.

I'll recite my latest experience with them here to show how bureaucratic, sloppy and unresponsive to customers' needs Citibank has become. I wanted to put some money in one of their deposit products. I called up the bank to find out details about the product. I suspect the call was routed to the call center. I started the conversation saying that I am existing customer, (in the hope that I will get better response), but the lady taking the call latched on to my opening sentence and wouldn't let the conversation proceed further. She insisted that if I am an existing customer, I should talk to another department. I tried to explain that I wanted to know about the bank's products, so it didn't matter that I came in as an existing customer. The call was terminated. So here you have a truly bizarre scenario: a customer wanting to give you business is put through a bureaucratic hassle that he wouldn't have suffered if he were not a customer!(They call this "Priority Banking Service", digest that). Of course, in the first place, it took good amount of trouble on the phone(several disconnects and call put on hold) to get through to some human being on the other side of the phone, but at the end of it all this ridiculously frustrating experience.

To me, this is symptomatic of a business that has become extremly bureaucratic by creating layers of procedural walls between them and their customers. Such organizations typically do not have happy employees either, compounding the problem further for customers.(Ever dealt with nationalized banks?) Their lower-level employees you are condemned to interact with are incapable of exercising discretion in the overall interest of business or are perhaps not authorized to. And those in middle and upper levels of management are too busy ladder-climbing in a big organization(where opportunities perhaps are shrinking). For them the unhappy retail customer is a pest; an avoidable distraction. So if you want to be heard, you've got to be a privileged customer, like maybe one who carries a few lakhs of cash in his wallet and a few crores in the savings account.:-)

For the rest of us folks, it seems to me that Citibank is sending the message that we don't matter. Its business will run regardless of gripes from a few of us.

Or will it? Citi group is one of the finance companies that took a hit in the recent global meltdown. Indian banks, no doubt just as equally uncaring about customer service, have actually fared better. So minus citibank's(earlier) edge in customer service, what really is the incentive to bank with them? You're safer with an Indian bank.