Fair to Customer, Fair to Bank

As our customer engagement deepened, the Bank aimed to further enhance digital delivery of products and services, offering comprehensive banking solutions with a sharp focus on efficiency and risks.

In fiscal 2023, the Bank increased its focus on delivering value and enhancing customer delight and advocacy by continuously reimagining processes and customer experience. The power of subtraction was leveraged in our service delivery framework, by streamlining processes and decongesting or digitising customer journeys. New-age technologies and platforms have been harnessed to enable ease of serving customers. The philosophy of ‘Fair to Customer, Fair to Bank’ underpinned the efforts to drive mutually beneficial customer relationships and build trust in our brand, while creating value across the customer life cycle.

The Bank continues to deepen its engagement with customers to understand their needs and expectations. Based on the insights gathered from proactive product and process walkthroughs, like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Voice of Customer (VOCs), customer complaints and Root Cause Analysis (RCAs), key customer service initiatives are implemented on an ongoing basis.

Some of the key initiatives towards enhancing and decongesting the onboarding and servicing experience of customers taken during fiscal 2023 included:

A complete digital journey has been enabled for faster current account onboarding for individuals and proprietors using Video KYC. A similar digital journey is being enabled for authorised signatory and beneficial owner.
Virtual Relationship Manager (VRM) platform has been implemented to enable Relationship Managers to receive analytics-driven nudges when engaging with customers using a universal access number, thus providing end-to-end servicing support and enhancing the transaction experience of customers.
Dedicated operations manpower have been co-located at high footfall business centres for transaction processing through the Digi Serve initiative.
TradeIntelli, an AI-ML-OCR¹ led system, has been implemented to intelligently process trade finance transactions without human intervention. It significantly reduces processing time in trade transactions with higher accuracy and delivers enhanced customer experience.
Neo Remittance System, the new retail outward remittance platform, has been created to make the process of remitting funds outside India faster, seamless and convenient. The platform harnesses capabilities such as instant SWIFT generation for payment, providing real-time updates to customers, being volume agnostic and requires minimal processing time.
Implementation of iCRM, a single customer relationship management system at an enterprise level is underway for lead management, onboarding and servicing.

^1. AI: Artificial Intelligence, ML: Machine Learning, OCR: Optical Character Recognition

ICICI Bank increased its focus on delivering value and enhancing customer delight and advocacy by continuously reimagining processes and customer experience.

REIMAGINING END-TO-END CUSTOMER LIFE CYCLE

Next-gen Phone Banking Experience

Various initiatives rooted in new-age technologies were implemented for smoothening the customer interactions on the phone banking channel. This included introducing a single toll free number (1800 1080) for servicing different products and customer segments, 24x7 servicing for retail liabilities and credit cards, voice bot processing calls to reduce the IVR wait time by ~60%, and voice biometric-based authentication.

Digitisation of Cards Life Cycle

Enhancing credit card customer experience was another focus area, and an industry-first large-scale implementation of new-age technologies was undertaken like Document Intelligence, Conversational AI, NLP² , Text Intelligence, Intelligent RPA³, etc. in areas across onboarding and servicing.

NEW DIGITAL EXPERIENCES

Various services were introduced and improvements made across digital channels to enhance customer experience. Features on iMobile Pay App were enhanced to enable re-KYC through Video KYC process, UPI-related features and enhancements, hyper-personalisation through Discover 2.0, PayLater feature, enhancements in credit card reward points journey, among others. Features on Retail Internet Banking were also enhanced. These included re-KYC through Video KYC process, option to activate 3D secure for NRI customers, etc.

SERVICE ENABLERS FOR EMPLOYEES

Empowering employees for a seamless engagement with customers is an ongoing endeavour at the Bank. During fiscal 2023, V-Serv was launched as an enabler for employees by providing assistance on processes across products and services, and supporting quick resolution of queries. Another initiative was iTrack, introduced in select business centres, to handle uncommon queries that may be received from customers. The objective of this initiative was to assist business centres to handle such queries and provide first-contact-resolution, thereby eliminating repeated visits by customers. GIB Buddy has been designed to respond to queries related to products and solutions and process for government and institutional banking customers.

The emphasis on Customer 360º and the leading digital capabilities have strengthened the Bank’s value proposition for customers and created a positive customer experience. Actively listening to our customers by continuously engaging through various channels like surveys, social media, business centre touchpoints and query resolution, are also supplementing the Bank’s efforts to improve customer journeys and service response. During fiscal 2023, the Bank saw a sustained improvement in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) across products and services, reflecting customer value creation and advocacy.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT BEYOND BANKING

Orange Book is a monthly e-magazine that educates customers about personal finance in a simple and
easy-to-understand manner.

Recognising customers’ need to understand personal finance better, the Bank launched a unique digital initiative 'The Orange Book' in fiscal 2022. This is a monthly e-magazine that educates customers about personal finance in a simple, easy-to-understand manner using contextual examples and infographics and helps them to take better financial decisions. The Orange Book covers an array of financial topics from investment planning, safe banking to tax savings, financial preparedness and much more. To improve the accessibility of the Book, the Bank has launched the book in English and Hindi. This initiative has been well-received by customers.

The Bank believes that a deeper and more meaningful connect with customers is possible particularly if the engagement is in the areas of their interest such as their hobbies or passions. With this belief, the Bank launched a pan-India customer engagement programme called ICICI Bank iShine where customers and their immediate families could showcase their talent across eight categories namely art, body and mind, dancing, food, performing arts, photography, singing and travel. The programme saw an overwhelming response with 1.8 million website visitors and 185,000 programme registrations. While Customer 360° banking, service orientation and humility form the basic tenets for serving our customers, engaging with our customers beyond banking is helping us build a stronger and deeper connect with them.

^2. NLP: Natural Language Processing

^3. RPA: Robotic Process Automation

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GRIEVANCE REDRESSAL

The Bank has a well-defined framework to monitor key customer service metrics and complaints. The Customer Service Committee of the Board and the Standing Committee on Customer Service meet regularly to deliberate on various facets of customer service and the initiatives undertaken by the Bank for enhancing the same.

The Bank complies with the 'Customer Rights Policy' which enshrines the basic rights of customers. These rights include Right to Fair Treatment; Right to Transparency, Fair and Honest Dealing; Right to Suitability; Right to Privacy; Right to Grievance Redress and Compensation. These policies can be accessed on the Bank’s website.

The Bank seeks to treat its customers fairly and provide transparency in product and service offerings. Continuous efforts are made to educate customers to enable them to make informed choices regarding banking products and services. The Bank also seeks to ensure that the products offered are based on an assessment of the customer’s financial needs.

The Bank’s grievance redressal mechanism is well-defined and comprehensive, with clear turnaround times for providing resolution to customers. The Bank provides multiple channels to customers to complain including the business centres, call centre and digital channels. All complaints received by the Bank are recorded in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and tracked for end-to-end resolution. The Bank has an escalation matrix built in the CRM system to ensure that customer requirements are appropriately addressed within stipulated timelines. The Bank also conducts detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCAs) of the issues highlighted in customer feedback, complaints, etc. and insights from the same are implemented to improve the products and processes and enhance the services of the Bank.

Further, as recommended by the Reserve Bank of India, the Bank has appointed senior retired bankers as Internal Ombudsmen of the Bank. The Customer Service Committee of the Board, the Standing Committee on Customer Service and the business centre level Customer Service Committees monitor customer service at different levels.

During fiscal 2023, the number of complaints received from customers declined.

For details refer to page 236 on customer complaints

DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY

ICICI Bank is committed to protecting the privacy of individuals whose personal data it holds, and processing such personal data in a way that is consistent with applicable laws. It is important for employees and businesses to protect customer data and follow the applicable privacy laws in India and overseas locations to ensure safety and security of data. We believe that the data privacy framework should be in line with the evolving regulatory changes and digital transformation.

The Bank has a global presence in several jurisdictions including Hong Kong, Singapore, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, Dubai International Financial Centre and Bahrain. The Bank is committed to ensuring compliance with applicable laws across these jurisdictions. It has an integrated and centralised strategy for achieving data privacy compliance across all jurisdictions. A set of principles have been defined with respect to handling customer data. There is a mechanism in place, which is accessible to all employees in the Bank, for reporting any form of personal data incident. The Personal Data Incident Handling Forum (PDIHF) comprises the Data Protection Officer (DPO) and senior members from the Information Security Group, Operational Risk Management Group, Fraud Management Group, Human Resources, Compliance and the Legal Team. Any kind of personal data related incidents reported through the service request undergoes detailed investigation and a report is presented to PDIHF on a monthly basis.

As per the Personal Data Protection Standard of the Bank, it ensures that all personal data it processes is kept secure using appropriate technical and organisational measures including necessary policies, processes and controls which includes physical access control, encryption or pseudonymisation, stress testing, risk assessment, data protection impact assessment and providing training to the Bank's employees. The Bank periodically updates the Personal Data Protection Standard to cover the personal data protection regulatory requirements as applicable to the Bank in India and its overseas offices to reflect the changes in data protection laws and regulations. An external review of the privacy maturity assessment was conducted in fiscal 2023, which placed the Bank’s data privacy practices to be above industry benchmarks.

Privacy regulations require the personal data of customers to be protected throughout its entire life cycle. Accordingly, the Bank has undertaken several comprehensive measures such as categorising all personal data and sensitive personal data as ‘Confidential Information’, keeping record of all its processing activities, entering into non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements with employees and third parties who are privy to personal data of the customers and providing customers the option to exercise various rights which they enjoy under applicable data protection regulations and incident handling procedures.

There are e-learning modules specifically on the concept of personal data and its protection to build awareness among employees. Periodic trainings are provided and various data privacy awareness initiatives are taken up by the Data Privacy team for employees to help them get an overview of data privacy and its importance in day-to-day work. Periodic mailers are also sent to the employees to create awareness about data privacy.

The Bank has established a strong governance framework for data privacy management. The Bank’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) oversees all privacy related developments for the Bank as a data processor for international banking business and as a data controller for NRI and remittance businesses. The Bank has designated data protection managers/representatives from each business function and at every overseas location to ensure the proper implementation of the privacy standard.

A Privacy Steering Committee meets every six months, and oversees various privacy related initiatives. Further, the Bank’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics covers guidelines on customer privacy and confidentiality of data.