RBI Wants Banks to Fix Repeat Customer Complaints
RBI wants banks to find why customer complaints keep returning. The deeper issue may lie in weak processes, staffing pressure and poor grievance systems.
The Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to look beyond simply closing customer complaints.
According to a recent report, RBI wants banks to identify the behind recurring complaints and conduct root-cause analysis. More than were received under the RBI Ombudsman framework in FY25, up 13.55% from the previous year.
That raises an important question:
What if repeated customer complaints are not just a customer-service problem?
A customer usually sees the branch employee, call-centre executive or relationship manager. But behind that interaction can be outdated processes, inadequate staffing, multiple approval layers, aggressive targets and employees handling several responsibilities at once.
Closing a complaint is not the same as fixing it
A complaint may be marked “resolved”, but if the same issue keeps appearing across customers, the underlying problem remains.
This is why RBI's focus on root-cause analysis matters.
If thousands of customers repeatedly complain about similar issues, banks need to ask whether the problem lies with an individual employee or with the process itself.
RBI has also stressed the need for stronger grievance-handling capacity and better internal systems.
Employees and customers may be facing the same broken system
Customer experience and employee work culture are often discussed separately.
Perhaps they should not be.
An understaffed branch affects employees through workload and customers through waiting time.
An unrealistic target affects employees through pressure and customers through aggressive selling.
A complicated internal process frustrates the banker trying to complete the transaction and the customer waiting for it.
So improving customer service cannot only mean telling frontline employees to “serve better”.
It also requires banks to examine whether their own systems allow employees to deliver that service.
RBI is asking the right question
Instead of asking only “Was this complaint closed?”, banks now need to ask:
That small change in approach could expose much bigger problems inside banking.
And fixing those problems may ultimately improve life for both sides of the counter: customers as well as bankers.
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