Being married to an HDFC customer

HDFC once rejected my corporate credit card application. Ohhhh and how glad am I now about that!! Because my husband (he who shall not be named, on request of course...oh don't ask...doesn't wanna have an online trail) is an HDFC bank and credit card customer and I have seen him suffer.

I started noticing it when he went to the bank quite a few times for this and that whereas I have only visited my bank twice in some 10 years. Then he added me as a payee on his Internet banking account. And it took 24 hours to register my name. Redeeming points to buy his mother something took a whole lot of talking on the phone with customer care. Who, by the way, only operate from 9 am to 8 pm or some shit like that. And every single instance I would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, saying "just change your bank!".

But he didn't. Until yesterday, when our frustration reached its peak. And here is how it all began.

We planned a Goa trip and wanted to use Jet Privilege miles. My husband had a lot of points on his HDFC credit card which he decided to convert to miles to redeem. True to HDFC's bad processes, where they like you to visit their branch all the time, he had to take a print out of the points transfer form, fill it, sign it, and drop it at the bank drop box. I thought he was kidding, until I saw it myself. And I told him again, "just change your bank". Anyway, he marched to the bank branch at Thakur Village and dropped it on 7th of May. It was to take 7-8 working days. I was getting irritated on why he was associated with this bank in the first place. I transfer miles at the click of a button on my Amex card. I can do anything from my ICICI online account. But these HDFC buggers don't even have a website on which I can login from my iPad! Grr.

Fine. 7-8 days. We waited. On 15th May, exactly 7 working days later, he called their customer care for status, only to be told that there was NO status! They had not even received the form! Some shit about the form being first sent to Chennai office where they will enter the information into the system. So 7 working days later, it had not even been entered into the system. A whole lot of shouting ensued, after which the phone was transferred to a "supervisor", Bhavesh Patel. Bhavesh reassured my husband that he would call in 2 days and it would all be done by then...not to worry. We calmed down. One flight from Mumbai to Goa and two return flights were already sold out for redemption at Jet Airways. Hmm.

Two days later, Mr. Bhavesh Patel had still not called so we had to call HDFC again. After spitting out the entire problem to multiple people who kept hanging up on us - and this is another thing unique to HDFC...they keep you on hold and after 3-4 minutes, they just hang up on you - we finally got through to another "superior" called Ms. Menon. She assured us she'd check and call back, because the system showed that it was under process, but she wasn't sure where it was stuck. Needless to say, she never called back. So the next day, we called again. It was now the 18th of May. Customer care happily told us that the points have already been transferred! My husband was heaving a sigh on relief when I asked him to stay on the line and went to the Jet Privilege site. No miles transferred. He asked the customer care executive who then said "it's under process sir, maybe it'll happen by day end." No, no, no, no...we were not gonna buy this bull shit. Where is it in process, we asked. Has the info been passed on to Jet even? Don't know. Again, we were transferred to the "supervisor" who luckily or unluckily happened to be our very own Mr. Bhavesh Patel again! Not only was the man indignant about his false assurance of calling us back, he couldn't even help us with our problem. I told him to give me a solution, or a number/ email address of a higher-up, but he was equipped to do none. Bad processes coupled with bad people. Worst combination ever. We were having this conversation at 6:30 pm and he said he would call the back end team (who are these teams and why is everything so invisible to the customer?) and get back to us in an hour. True to his word this time, he called back at 7:30 to tell us that the back end team had already gone home for the day. When I said nothing doing, we have waited enough, I refuse to wait any further and want a solution NOW, he just kept quiet! I said, "we can both keep quiet, how's that gonna help?". To which he still kept quiet! I said "fine! We'll both keep quiet! Great!". At which point our conversation went into that limbo when you fight with your boyfriend and just look away from each other with nobody saying a word, waiting for the ther person to speak first so they are judged as the weaker party, based on some unwritten rule of relationships!

Sigh. At this time, my hsuband just couldn't take it any more and a barrage of expletives came out of his poor harassed-by-HDFC-forever mouth. At which time, Bhavesh asked him to calm down and when he didn't, our dear Bhavesh hung up. I switched on the TV and said, "just change your bank". And he said, "absolutely". And that's where it ended..

It's the 19th now and the miles have still not been transferred. Redemption of miles is not possible for the flights on our chosen dates coz all redemption seats are sold out. So I had to go online and buy Spicejet tickets.

If you don't have an HDFC bank account or credit card, thank your stars and stay away from them. This is how they treat their platinum customers, so you can just imagine how bad their system is!

Middle finger, HDFC.