My readers will know how much trouble my friend had with Standard Chartered Bank. If you need more details, you can do no better than go to this post. To go deeper, you can read this post too.
I too had an occasion to face some poor customer service from them later when hard copies of the monthly bills were not being received by me and I was asked to pay penalties for delayed payments. With much exchange of mails and telephone calls it was resolved by SCB discovering that their mailing system had omitted my name for some reason from their mailing list and they apologised and reversed the penalty charges.
I suspect that this attitude towards customers has evolved in The Standard Chartered Bank due to what is called “Back Office Processing” being outsourced to contractors. If they have outsourced Customer Service also to contractors, I am afraid that I am in for a long haul and may well decide to discontinue using their credit card. I inherited it from Grindlays Bank with who I had an extremely long and very satisfying relationship, but Standard Chartered does not appear to care for customers who pay their bills on time. Perhaps they do not like the earnings that such customers generate whereas customers who delay payments or pay in installments are preferred over people like me. Here is the latest instance of poor customer service which is yet to be resolved by Standard Chartered Bank.
On the 4th of June, 2012, I received this message on my telephone from them.
“Your credit card pymt for stmt 21/05/12 is due on 08/06/12. Total due INRxxxxxxxxx.Minimum Due:INRxxxxx. Please ignore if already paid-StanChart.”
I promptly arranged a bank transfer on the same day for the entire amount so that I do not get charged any penalties.
It is to be noted that till then, I had not received any statement of account from StanChart either by hard copy as I always receive every month nor did I get any emails from them enclosing an electronic statement of accounts.
On the 5th of June, I sent this mail to their Customer Service address by email.
“I use your credit card No. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I am yet to receive the monthly statement for May 2012. Based on a text message received on my mobile phone, I have made payment but would like to cross check the amount due with the statement.
Please expedite the despatch of the statement.
Thank you.
On the 6th of June, I received the following email from them:
Dear Mr. Rajgopaul,
This is with reference to your e-mail dated June 05, 2012.
We are in receipt of your payment for Rs.xxxxxxx and the same has been credited
to your card ending XXXX on June 01, 2012.
As requested, we have sent the copy of the May, 2012 statement to your e-mail
id. Trust you are in receipt of the same.
Assuring you of our best services always
Yours sincerely,
Arindam
Officer – Customer Care
On the same day, I responded by email:
No, I have not yet received the copy sent to my email id.
I wrote about the hard copy that you send every month. I have not received that either.
What will you be sending every month from now on? The hard copy by post/courier or an email statement?
I am comfortable with either but I would appreciate receiving A statement every month well before the due date as I have hitherto been receiving.
On the 7th June, I received what StanChart called a Duplicate Bill by email.
On the 7th June, I received this eamil from them.
Dear Mr. Rajgopaul,
This is with reference to your e-mail dated June 06, 2012.
As requested, we have sent the copy of the May statement to your e-mail id.
Trust you are in receipt of the same.
Further, our records indicate that your e-mail id has been registered for our
e-statement facility and the e-statements have been sent to your E-mail id every
month. We request you to check your bulk mail folder.
Assuring you of our best services always
Yours sincerely,
Ravichandran
Officer – Customer Care
On the same day, I responded with the following mail. Please be patient and read it to understand my angst.
Dear Mr. Ravichandran,
I am rather disappointed with your routine response.
Yes, my email id as well as my telephone details are very likely to be registered with you and I do get phone alerts whenever I use the credit card for any purchase.
But, I have not till this morning, when I received your copy of the copy of the earlier estatement, ever received any estatement so far and all my earlier communications with you have been based on hard copies of the monthly statements received by me. I have once again checked my bulk mail folder to find that I have never received any estatement ever. If you can depute someone from your Pune office to come over to my residence, I can show all the hard copies till last month. I am physically handicapped and it would be difficult for me to visit your local office though if needed, I am prepared to do that too.
I have gone so far to check my spam folder as well and find that I have not received any estatement from you.
It is remarkable that I have now received a copy of the statement after I confirmed non receipt in my last email to you, but not the original that you had mentioned in your earlier mail. I suspect that there is something wrong in your mailing list and would appreciate your looking into it instead of putting the ball back in my court. Trust me, I am very computer savvy and I get other credit card statements by email every month. As I had mentioned earlier, I would prefer receiving the estatment and hence my request to you to not treat my mail to be responded in a routine manner. Please do investigate thoroughly at your end as to why I do not get the estatement and more importantly, why I did not get the last month’s hard copy of the statement.
I trust that you would appreciate that unless I get the statement in one form or the other, I would be delaying payments at considerable cost to me. Unless of course you would prefer that I incur such a cost, please do look into my complaint in detail and take such corrective measures as necessary to solve the problem so that I get monthly statements either by hard copy or by estatements, under advise to me.
I would appreciate your detailed response at the earliest.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that I have gone missing from your mailing list and exactly like it is happening now, I was blamed till I raised the matter at higher levels when it was found that there was a problem at your end. If you would like, you could go back some three years ago when this happened. I had also use the blogspace some time ago to resolve another friend’s issue about which you can read here http://rummuser.com/?p=419 I hope that I do not have to again lose my trust in SCB.
Regards,
RAMANA RAJGOPAUL
Having waited for any response, on the 15th June I sent a reminder to Card Services with the heading REMINDER I forwarding the earlier correspondence. I have so far sent four reminders to them for a response and I am yet to receive any thing from them other than their usual auto generated acknowledgement email that within 7 working days my problem will be attended to.
It is now time for the next cycle of billing to start and I wonder if I will get the statement of accounts for June or whether I will have to go through the entire rigmarole that I had to go through earlier.