Retail Focus awesome. Review on Citibank

I've been a Citibank customer for almost 6 years now - one

of the first Suvidha Customers, have a Silver International

Credit Card and took a home loan through Shelters.

Here's how I would rate them (out of 10)

Innovative products--- 8.5

Technology Usage------ 9.0

Non-Intrusiveness----- 8.0

'Problems arisen'----- 7.5 (10 is no problem at all)

'Problems fixed'------ 9.0

Responsiveness(phone)- 9.5

Responsiveness(email)- 7.5

Systems/Processes----- 8.5

You can see - I'm a very satisfied customer overall.

Only gripe I've ever had is with Shelters' service stds,

and they're not Citibank per se but DSAs.

Suvidha, Home Credit were pioneering products when launched.

There have been glitches once in a while - but in Citibank's

case - their people are empowered enough to fix things over

the phone (unlike HSBC who have dumb call centres).

Their ATM network was quite huge - way before ICICI expanded.

Inside Bangalore its quite great tho ICICI has a better

network if u're out on the highway/smaller towns.

Citibank went online in a big way a long time ago. In fact

I've never been to a branch yet! You can do a whole lot of

stuff on the net.

Responsiveness over the phone is awesome. Twice I've needed

to chase the courier cos and they've done it to get the

(Citibank) stuff delivered home. They kept us informed

throughout.

Once I even got my credit limited raised instantaneously

for some big purchase - just by giving them a call.

Flexibilty:

They sent me 2 new (photo) cards cause they did not get my

first application soon enough and asked me to send it again.

On pointing out that this had happened - one charge (100/-)

was immediately reversed.

Great pluses:

DDs are free online and in fact to most places they even

courier them for free

Their Credit Card points work really well

The cheque book, DD etc requests are met within a day.

the online interface is great - though a little slow.

Its been truly branch-free and 24 hours right from the

beginning.

the flip-side

My experience with Shelters, their home loan guys, was less

than great. The sales people did not know the product well

and over-promised. So despite it being a very useful deal

for certain scenarios, I was left with a bitter taste in the

mouth to begin with. (Since then though its been ok).

Also - the time when they quietly gave 'free' insurance where

you would be charged after a while if u didn't refuse - this

was a very 'US' thing to do and not fair to customers. But

when there was some pressure from the press/customers,

they immediately stopped this and refunded whatever had been

charged.