E-banking loses charm

Hyderabad: Online banking transactions are increasing in volume rapidly, but customer satisfaction doesn’t seem to be proportional. Recent reports have suggested that the customer experience in India is getting worse and proportion of people with a positive banking experience is also going down.

A recent report by Capgemini said that India is one of the few countries in the world where banking customer experience for 2013 has witnessed a downgrade over the previous year.

The customer experience index was rated at 75.4 falling nearly 2 per cent over the previous year. More interestingly, proportion of banking customers with positive experience also reduced by nearly 4 per cent. Several people have been experiencing troubles in online banking transactions, not only with public sector banks, but also with private sector ones.

“Transactions fail several times and it is not as if my internet connection speed is on the slower side. Sometimes the ‘submit’ buttons are missing or the transaction just fails. I tried to send in feedback as well, but that too failed,” said Swati S., who holds an account with ICICI Bank.

A majority of complaints are filed against banks for ‘failure to meet commitments and non-observance of fair practices code’ followed by debit and credit card related problems.

“The increasing use of electronic and internet-based banking services have brought in its wake certain concerns associated with safety of funds and security of the environment, in which these transactions are put through,” Dr K.C. Chakraborty, deputy governor, RBI, said in the Ombudsman report.