NEW DELHI, February 13: Erosion in the quality of service among public sector banks has led to a fall in recovery, rise in the number of frauds and a general apathy towards public, a recent nation-wide consumer survey has revealed.More than 75 per cent of the consumers have expressed "disgust" with the poor quality service rendered by the banks since nationalisation and over 57 per cent favour competition from private and foreign banks, the survey reveals. Most respondents felt that public sector banks' customer service was "far below expectations" in areas like clearing of outstation cheques, inter-bank transactions, unreconciled entries and the inordinate delays in processing of loans.
The nation-wide survey, coordinated by the consumer Coordination Council (CCC) in collaboration with the Fredrich Naumann Stiftung (a German liberal group funding agency), revealed that sometimes it took as much as 20 days to clear outstation cheques.
"The basic idea behind such survey was to get feed-back fromconsumers about their expectations about the services and to create an interface between banks and customers," says Bijon Mishra, advisor to the apex consumerorganisation. More than 76 per cent of the respondents felt that opening anew account still was a cumbersome process.
Among them 40 per cent of the customers faced the problem due to long queues and about 60 per cent people were peeved by the long list of procedures.
"Banks should move towards more customer friendly approach like settling disputes through ombudsman rather than going for time consuming legal process" Mishra said.
More than 50 per cent of customers faced problems because of indifferent attitude by staff who virtually ignored verbal complaints and delayed action on written ones, the survey revealed.
The survey also identified services like making drafts and pay orders, availed frequently by customers, a very time consuming process.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
