How companies provide Customer Care Support in India, it is not a hidden fact.

Today’s brush with the customer care of one well known company: Axis Bank made me write an article about what we are up to.

I’d like to agree with one my US Green Card holder that living in India has one big disadvantage – namely everything is a hassle. You simply can’t concentrate on you job, family life. You will most likely face some or other hassles across full day.

You need to run for LPG gas, pay for your electricity bills, problem in your BSNL phone, no signal in your cell phone, calling a carpenter for a work, traveling in train, booking a bus ticket, admission of you child in a school etc.

Let me talk about one non-physical hassle – a hassle caused while simply sitting on my work chair but more importantly wasted my precious work time. But who cares for in India? Aren’t there much bigger issues like – rape, dowry, corruption and poverty there?

Let us know more about Axis Bank first.

The About Us Page

This is what it describes about itself in the about us page:

The Bank has a very wide network of more than 1281 branches (including 169 Service Branches/CPCs as on 31st March, 2011). The Bank has a network of over 6270 ATMs (as on 31st March, 2011) providing 24 hrs a day banking convenience to its customers. This is one of the largest ATM networks in the country.

Let us see where it stands and what is Axis Bank’s target in it’s own words:

The Bank has strengths in both retail and corporate banking and is committed to adopting the best industry practices internationally in order to achieve excellence.

My Hassle

I want to open a current account on my mother’s name with Axis Bank in Aligarh but I’m not based in Aligarh! As my parents are old all I want is that an Axis Bank executive contact my parents to get an account opened.

Today I’ve tried to get Axis Bank, Aligarh’s contact number so that I can talk to Bank personnel. Today is Tuesday and is full working for the bank.

My first step was to locate Axis Bank site and then I went to Branch finder and selected Aligarh city and this contact details I found on it:

You can see that there are four phone numbers and another 3 toll free numbers present there. Mind you that the first four phone numbers are written in very unreadable fashion. First I tried calling the direct phone numbers ( with 0571). Nobody lifted it, no response. In one direct number : 274 1873 I got the reply that "this isn’t Axis Bank!".

Then I tried calling the toll free numbers from my Idea prepaid. Two numbers will simply get disconnected, one nobody lifted.

Now I searched for all India toll free numbers. I found it and those were same as mentioned above but never mentioned that those are all-India numbers.

Are those number toll free from BSNL or Airtel? No mention about it! Simply "toll free"!

Ultimately call to one number went through. After many menu selections I waited to talk to the operator and some music played for around 3 minutes. Now I got connected to a customer care executive who gave two new numbers for Aligarh branch, not aware of the numbers present in the Axis Bank website for Aligarh branch.

Here are the two numbers: 0571 274 3977, 0571 274 1852. Ok I was happy. But when I tried calling them nobody lifted. All these happened between 11 am and 2.30 pm. I tried many times but no success. Once I even found one number busy. When I tried again it went through but no response. So now today it is 6 pm as I write this and feel frustrated.

Who understands value of time in India? A least service we expect from any public service provider like a Bank that we should be able to contact bank without any hassle. And what does it take for bank to do?

I’m not angry to Axis Bank specifically. All I want to tell is that this is the attitude of many companies in India for being negligent in providing the most basic customer service - customer care!