Isn’t ICICI Bank going Indian Government way?

I am an ICICI Bank customer for a long time now. I also have a credit card with them. Trust me, having an Internet-banking-enabled bank account and credit card of same bank is a blessing. You don’t need to worry about anything, keep on spending in malls and repay sitting in your office chair. I appreciate ICICI Bank’s Internet/Phone banking capabilities (and fantastic security too), I really don’t remember when I visited my bank branch last!

But unfortunately I have had a few highly disappointing incidences with the bank. The latest was horrible. Here I go:

I had ordered some gifts against my reward points on 25th of July and I received them on 28th or so. I was to give some of them to Sudha. Before I could give her these, someone from BlueDart called me asking if I have opened the box? I answered in positive. The guy on the other side said, ‘Sir, ICICI has asked us to take the parcel back! There is some problem in the delivery’. I was surprised as if there was some problem why didn’t ICICI call me? Anyways, I asked the guys to come and collect the ‘opened’ box. I couldn’t do anything but to apologize to her!

Today is 12th August and there is no news about the gifts or my reward points! Mess!

Is this the way a bank like ICICI should behave? If there was some problem they should have called me regretting for what they have done and should have asked me for a balanced solution. Or were they supposed to ask some third-party to take the gifts back from my hands? Can you imagine, how humiliating it is? At that moment I thought of suing the bank literally but cooled myself off thinking, this is the way we all are. And ICICI is no exception.

Another bad experience I had was when I contacted them for a small personal loan sometime back. I contacted three banks i.e. ICICI, HDFC and Citi. Among them HDFC and Citi were more than desperate to give me the loan, in fact Citi committed to hand me over the cheque within 2 days. But since I bank with ICICI, I thought it would be better to get loan from these people but ICICI didn’t give me a damn even after receiving all the desired papers. They didn’t even bother to contact me since then.

Anyhow I don’t need a loan anymore but the practice was a lesson to me that DON’T SEEK ICICI FOR ANY SERIOUS BUSINESS! They have got enough mullahs and are happy with that. ICICI is happy to be what it is today and doesn’t have intention to expand.

In nutshell, I think ICICI is overall a great bank until everything is a success in one go, but if something needs a second attempt, you will have tough time with them.