Improving customer care... By Shahryar
16 October, 2012
The corporate culture of customer service or customer-specific services does not exist in Pakistan. This is mainly due to the limited number of competitors, but mostly it is due to the low levels of innovation and creativity skills among the leaders of the business community. Take, for example, the services offered by the banking sector of Pakistan. Although there are enough competitors in the market, they all lack innovation and only promote their products or services through the 'copy paste' method, where all the competitors offer the same services at almost the same rates. The banking sector offers free online banking to all its individual consumer accounts but it does not offer any free banking service to its corporate customers who actually need these services more. Most businesses in Pakistan pay their suppliers and get payments from their customers via their bank accounts to ensure all transactions are captured for tax purposes. Therefore, it is important for the business owner to check the status of incoming payments and also to make payments to his suppliers on time. However, the banking sector in Pakistan offers the same services (plus many more) free of cost to all of its individual account holders, which shows that these banks have the facilities and technology to offer similar services to businesses in Pakistan as well. The banks claim that since corporate companies are owned by a number of shareholders, offering access to online transactions to a corporate account can create liability issues over who is responsible. Therefore they will only provide details to a corporate customer about his account on the phone or via a printed statement that has to be collected from the bank. However, if these banks had any innovation sense, they could have offered a special corporate online banking service to allow account signers to view, print and download transactions history only, avoiding any liability issues and also helping corporate customers to check the status of payments to or from their account. I hope this suggestion can spur some innovation among the banking community, which can come up with similar solutions for the corporate sector of Pakistan. SHAHRYAR KHAN BASEER
Peshawar
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