Social Customer Service Review – ICICI Bank

ICICI Bank is an Indian multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai. With a second largest market capitalization, it has more than 3K+ branches and 11K+ ATM machines. Such large scale services definitely demands a strong customer service and support system.
ICICI Bank has a great website with dedicated sections for  customer support. In addition, they have a strong presence on Facebook with 3M fan base and on Twitter with 14K followers. On Twitter, ICICI Bank has 2 separate twitter handles ICICI Bank and ICICIBank_Cares. ICICIBank_Cares is dedicated towards resolving customer queries and complaints on Twitter. But on Facebook, the comment on Wall feature is disabled, hence as usual customers are posting their complaints under the posts made by the Page.
Lets get into details of how they are responding to customer queries and complaints on social media.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
ICICI Bank has a very formal tone on social media. Almost all the queries are handled using a similar message like “Please send us you contact number and our official will get in touch with you.”


Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
ICICI Bank is certainly using canned responses to reply to concerns and queries. In general most of the replies are in the context to the queries but there is one instance where out of context conversation was observed.
In the example below, the person raising an issue is not the customer of ICICI Bank and doesn’t want to receive calls from ICICI Bank. But in the response you can clearly observe that the ICICI’s response is not getting this context and instead responding the similar canned response which they send to their cusomter, and this doesn’t make any sense in this case. Even the follow up response to register for Do Not Call Registry is actually a wrong response as the person is not the customer of ICICI.

But most concerns related to websites and mobiles are resolved within the tweet or replies itself without any delay, which is great.

But there was one instance where ICICI Bank seems to be bit relaxed in its response concerning the positive response from a customer.

Element 3 – Turnaround Time
ICICI Bank doesn’t have a good response time – On Facebook their response time varies from 3 hrs to more than 24 hours and on Twitter their response time is close to 21 hours on average (The data has been taken from 133 replies/conversations made by the twitter handle).
We have seen a very quick response time in other industries like Airlines and Telecom where the repsonse time is within few minutes.
Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
On Facebook, most conversations include the name of the customer, whereas on Twitter it’s the Twitter handle. Most conversations are contextual to the issue and to the point. But almost every conversations looks the same, its either requesting for information or confirmation on the service.
 
Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
There is an standard follow up message which ICICI Bank sends to most of the queries. But not everyone receives this follow up.

Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
On Facebook, most complaints resides on the post made by the pages, hence most of them are attended though not in 100%. On Twitter, not all complaints and queries are responded. Firstly the response time is not that impressive and some of the complaints are completely ignored. As a result, some other service providers are happy to attend.

Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums has about 1024 complaints about ICICI Bank alone, but none of the complaints/queries have been responded.

Further, they have a genuine profile on consumercomplaints.in but the engagement on the site is very low. Despite regular complaints being filed on the site, there is hardly any active engagment with the customer. Further, ICICI Bank is using the same standard response on the site which they are using on Facebook and Twitter.


Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
Despite the fact that most of their responses look very similar, there was no instances of duplicate replies being observed.
Considering that ICICI Bank is a financial service and that it will have stronger concerns towards customer’s privacy and security, they might have different levels of industry guidelines. But on Social Media, ICICI Bank need to find a balance and be responsive to complaints and concerns and try to resolve without compromising on security of the customers.