You just need to SMS ‘Unhappy’; state HQ does the rest. It’s now an ISB case study.
“A complaint is a gift”. This is the new motto of State Bank of India (SBI) in Andhra Pradesh. One they seem to be actually trying to practise.
SBI in AP has been getting about 2,000 complaints every month since it launched its SMS ‘Unhappy’ service in the state on December 11 last year.
“Before the service was launched, we used to get about 150 complaints a month. Now, there is more than 10-fold increase in the number of complaints but we are happy,” Chief General Manager Shiva Kumar told Business Standard.
The novel service launched by Kumar encourages SBI customers to SMS the word ‘unhappy’ if they have any complaints to a preset number (80082-02020). Within minutes, the complainant gets a response on his mobile, stating “Your SMS has arrived in SBI’s Happy Room at Hyderabad. Your satisfaction is our destination. We shall call you shortly to get details.”
Following this, a staffer at the bank’s service centre, christened ‘Happy Room’, calls the customer and takes the details of the complaint and punches into a digitally networked system. The branch manager concerned automatically gets an SMS about the complaint. He should open the website to view the complaint and subsequently type back his response and the action taken into the system. The Happy Room staffers will access this and tell the customer.
There are built-in security features to ensure nobody except authorised officials at the regional head office can modify or delete the complaints and also the responses sent by the branch heads.
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“The customer just has to SMS the word ‘unhappy’. Everything else will be taken care of by the bank, which will report to him on the action taken. This can also be termed Green Banking, as there is no paper transaction, for the entire process is done through the Internet and mobile phone,” Kumar said.
The ‘unhappy’ service also pushed SBI to number one position in terms of customers satisfaction in Hyderabad. Interestingly, according to The Hindustan Times-MaRS customer satisfaction survey conducted this March, SBI is number one only in Hyderabad. Axis Bank, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank are ahead of SBI in all other metropolitan cities, excluding Kolkata, where it comes a joint second with HDFC.
“Our mission is to be first in customer satisfaction and we have achieved that,” a beaming Kumar, who joined the banking service in 1975, said.
SBI chairman, O P Bhatt, who recently visited the Happy Room, now wants to replicate the service across the country. And, the Indian School of Business has taken up the initiative as a case study in its management course.
Explaining how he embarked upon launching the unique service, Kumar said at least half a dozen times in the past, he had been “very agitated” against services provided by some of the public utilities in the country. He wanted to lodge a complaint but never had the time or patience to write and lodge a complaint.
“I used think that I will write a complaint tomorrow and submit it. But, not once in my life time did I write a complaint,” Kumar said, adding this made him to think about an easy way of lodging a complaint.
He gave shape to his idea for the first time when he was working in Lucknow. While he was there, the SMS service was launched but once the SMS was received, the bank used to process it manually. He upgraded the service to a web-based system when he was posted in Bhubaneswar but “only in Hyderabad has it been fully automated”.
Kumar said in the past six months, Happy Room had received 11,654 complaints. Of these, 11,200 were resolved. While 64 per cent of the complaints were resolved within 48 hours of their receipt, 11 per cent of the complaints were resolved in three days.