Although the recent process of mergers and rationalisation in banking industry has been phenomenal, accompanied by vast improvement in their physical infrastructure, IT systems, salary levels, and financial strength, the operating aspects have not kept pace, resulting in serious deterioration in quality of customer service.
As far as I know, State Bank requires every bank to send monthly or, at least, quarterly statements to account-holders. For a majority of personal and business account-holders, periodic statements are essential, especially because banks debit charges to accounts without sending any advice, thus keeping client in the dark about his correct bank balance. Twenty years back, banks used to send debit/credit advices as well as account statements regularly in spite of manual record-keeping.
You would find most of the staff in banks clueless about the matters which they are supposedly handling and they would blame head-office or computer system for their lack of knowledge. Centralised record-keeping, without fast liaison and communication between staff located in different premises, leads to buck-passing. Not only the banks fail to mail the statements, but are unable to provide account statement when someone goes personally to collect it, on the ground of computer being down. They debit charges with alacrity but would take days or even weeks to refund wrongly debited charges. Some banks even charge Rs 50/- for providing an account statement. The staff seldom attend to their telephone calls and I have counted 25 rings without getting any response. On many occasions the concerned staff is absent and everyone else presents this excuse for refusing to attend to customer's grievances.
Once I had requested a foreign bank where our firm had a ten-year relationship, to open an LC for import. Keeping status of our account in mind, the bank should have done the needful in two days but the incompetent officers told me that the delay in LC opening was the result of the bank's lack of interest in small business. After 3/4 weeks delay I went to see a senior official who at first said that he did not attend to such matters but would look into our case. When I impressed on him the urgency he was still reluctant to make any time commitment. Only when I asked him to let me know the name of any person in the bank who could say, "The buck stops here", he realised his responsibility and resolved the matter next day.
The major reason of this state of affairs is the great paucity of educated, intelligent and well-trained staff. The State Bank also fails to properly oversee the service quality.
I tried to contact SBP officials on certain banking matters but gave up when after four days of trying their UAN I failed to get connected to the "mysterious concerned officer".
Although State Bank has achieved many improvements in our banking scenario, it has miserably failed in staff training, quality of service and its recent debacle in printing of notes and minting of coins of durable quality, size and design (being its basic responsibility) is before all of us.