Keep customers at the forefront: HDFC chief | Economic Times

HDFC Bank CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan has set customer service, cultural transformation and better conscience as the agenda for the staff at India’s most valuable lender. In an email to more than 100,000 employees, Jagdishan appealed that the staff keep customers at the forefront of all their actions while being humble and honest.“Our customers have made the brand and we should never lose sight of this,” Jagdishan wrote in the email sent on Monday. “Our actions should always have our customers at the centre. We should be humble and honest. If we err, we should have the humility to apologise. It only makes us more human… When it is a question of building trust, it takes years to make, but just seconds to evaporate if there are any deviations.”During a significant digital outage in November last year, Jagdishan had quickly stepped in to assuage customer fears and apologised for not living up to customer expectations. In a first for any bank, the Reserve Bank of India imposed business sanctions on the private sector lender and directed it to stop issuing new credit cards or going in for any new digital launches till it fixed the issues.The bank had 117,560 employees at the end of December 2020. At the end of Tuesday’s trading session, it had a market cap of ₹8.19 lakh crore.Jagdishan also wrote about cultural transformation wherein each and every employee focuses on transparency and about disallowing greed in the system. He made it clear that the bank cannot allow a handful to besmirch and undo the brand value created by all employees.“The culture of not allowing greed and avarice means we cannot allow a handful to besmirch and undo the honest toil of each one of us,” Jagdishan wrote. “My definition of culture among other things are being honest and transparent, not promoting self-aggrandisement and also the culture of giving back to the society. These are non-negotiable and should be imbibed in the DNA of every bank employee.”The bank hit the headlines for the wrong reasons when it was found that some employees at the auto loans department allegedly forced customers to buy GPS devices bundled with car loans. It was found that some customers were not even aware of purchasing such a product till the loan documents were checked. These errant employees started forcefully bundling the GPS devices with car loans to meet sales targets and potentially track borrowers in the event of a default.