If you are a reader of this blog then you would know that from time to time I write about experiences with various service provider. The latest was about the hosting service provider Hostinger. It was a delight to interact with them despite some rough turns. Unfortunately, the trend of positiveness did not continue for long and it went down the drain again. To be correct, in chronological order the engagement with L&T started way before I even knew that hostinger exist.

L&T financial services has range of products to choose and one can find those on their website, which they proudly list as www.ltfs.com. The staff has no idea about HTTP or HTTPS; not that I expect them to have that knowledge. But the fact is that the website is configured to work only on HTTPS. But they have missed to configure a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS port. Due to this, the regular link does not work. For the landing page this problem can be solved by searching the website in google rather than typing the domain name. Trouble is that they have configured their internal URL references to just domain names. Due to this you cannot navigate on their website through menu bar.

May be you are wondering that why was I working with their IT department. Well, I was not. My situation was that I had couple of mutual funds from L&T. Due to some reason I had to close one of my bank accounts. I did not realize that it was connected to L&T funds. So, now I had to request L&T to change my bank account in their system. One can do that by directly contacting L&T or through a common provider CAMS. As I had to do it for few other agencies as well, I decided to go through CAMS. I won’t write the whole thing again, but at the end I left you a list of chronological events that happened during the course of changing bank account over the period of 7 months!! Yes, it took 7 months to change a bank account. In that time the global stock markets crashed and recovered almost to the levels before COVID19.

Using the criteria I used for hostinger, let me write in brief on each of those points. I won’t write long as I am now too tired of writing about L&T.

Responsive :

Team reacts very fast for the emails, despite the COVID situation. But are they responsive? To me, No. It would appear that people are either tired or under pressure to just sent replies quickly from their scripts without trying to understand the situation.

Continuity:

Every email gets picked up by a different agent, which is usual and expected in a large service team. The trouble is that their is no continuity. Many times you gets the same response that you were trying to correct with the the last agent.

Individuals:

This is of course related to above. It would appear that different individuals have either different scripts or they all do not have the same level of access to the system.

Readiness to help :

This I am sure the agents would say that they did whatever they could. But, if after submitting an application 5 times, the guy just says please submit new application with again standard documents and wrong/confusing language, it is not considered readiness to help in my world. To add to it, when I asked about escalation contact after 6 months, the request was simply ignored.

Ready for change:

Not at all! Not even once any agent or for that matter even the 1st level escalation acknowledged that they have something messed up. They consistently say they have seamless process and as a responsible finance company they are doing everything in the “right way”. Even when I say, that I have done the same procedure with another agencies through the same common agent CAMS, no one stopped to think that it could mean their is chance to improve. Even for technical issue of website not working, they did not stop to think why a customer is saying this. After all website is the front face of a company in a digital world. They rather assume that I have Internet explorer version less than 8.0 or some Netscape maybe, despite the fact that I gave them a technical solution for the problem.

In am happy that I could finally got my money out. Although it was not the intention when I started the process of bank account change. But after 7 months of pain, I could think of no better way to bring smile to my face again.

So, if you want to keep smiling you know what to do….

Keep Smiling

Love

Arundeep

Mulla Nasrudin was stabbed by burglars. But before dying he wrote a note to his wife from the hospital. The last paragraph of it read: “I have been very fortunate because only the day before I had put all of my money and negotiable bonds in my safety deposit box at the bank, SO THAT I AM LOSING PRACTICALLY NOTHING BUT MY LIFE.”

How to change bank account with L&T Financial Services mutual fund

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