Grievance redressal takes front seat

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An effective customer service mechanism lies in proper structuring of customer grievance. There should be layers and filtering of customer grievance as it is escalated up the ranks in an organisation to exhaust all possibilities of redressing a grievance. In the world of financial services, ombudsman plays the crucial role of the highest level to which a customer grievance can travel for proper disposal.

Last week, Reserve Bank of India announced that in order to strengthen the customer redressal mechanism of non-banking financial companies (NBFC), a system of internal ombudsman will be introduced in NBFCs. It is a welcome step since it adds the top layer in this critical function of a financial institution. Though banks have always hogged the centrestage in the financial service architecture, NBFCs wield no less influence.

There are hundreds of NBFCs in India which account for a huge section of the population servicing important financing needs of the society. They are involved in disbursing loans for the individual such as housing loans, auto loans, gold loans, personal loans and businesses such as microfinance and MSME loans. Needless to say, NBFCs generate a lot of customer grievances and the presence of an ombudsman would help the mechanism.

Internal ombudsmen do not handle complaints directly from the public. They usually deal with complaints that have already been addressed by the internal grievance redressal system but could not be addressed to satisfaction. Since most of the complaints directly relate to money matters, customers regularly get impatient with delays in redressal. Till January this year, there were more than 9,000 NBFCs registered with RBI. The number of customers, obviously, lies in crores and crores.

As far as the model for ombudsmen for banks go, an ombudsman should be a working or retired officer not below the rank of a deputy general manager. He/she must have the experience of working of minimum seven years of working in areas such as banking regulation, supervision, settlement and payment systems. The banking regulator issue separate notification for the internal ombudsman scheme for NBFCs. But mere notification does not suffice. It has to be implemented in letter and spirit for better customer experience.