Vetting a Customer Notice Before It Is Printed
A semi-urban branch of a public sector bank must display a revised service-charge notice with effect from 1 September 2025. The branch manager has drafted the text below and asked you, a probationary officer, to vet it before it is printed, signed and pinned to the notice board.
Dear Valued Customer, We wish to inform you that w.e.f. 01.09, the charges for issuance of demand drafts has been revised. Kindly note that the bank is not responsible for any delay caused due to technical reasons. Customers whom have not submitted their re-KYC documents are requested to do so at the earliest failing which their account will be freeze without any further notice. For any clarification please contact the undersigned. Yours faithfully, Branch Manager
The constraints you have been given: the notice must state the actual new charge for a demand draft up to ₹1 lakh (₹50 plus GST) and the effective date in full; it must fit within 90 words; it must not promise anything the branch cannot guarantee; and it must be defensible if a customer escalates to the banking ombudsman. The printer's deadline is 4 p.m. today.
1. Identify five distinct weaknesses in the draft, label each one as grammar, ambiguity, tone or regulatory risk, and explain in one or two lines why it matters on a public notice.
Read the worked answer
Grammar (subject–verb agreement): 'the charges for issuance of demand drafts has been revised' - the head noun is the plural charges, so it must be 'have been revised'. A printed grammatical error on a bank's board undermines the authority of the notice.
Ambiguity (date): 'w.e.f. 01.09' gives neither the year nor a readable date, and Indian usage reads 01.09 as 1 September only by convention. A charge cannot be levied from a date the customer cannot fix with certainty.
Ambiguity (substance): the revised charge is announced but never stated. A notice that says something has changed, without saying what it is now, is not a notice at all - it defeats the purpose of display.
Grammar (case of pronoun): 'Customers whom have not submitted' - who is the subject of have submitted; whom is wrong here. 'will be freeze' should be 'will be frozen'.
Tone and regulatory risk: 'without any further notice' announces a peremptory freeze. Freezing an account for incomplete KYC requires prior individual notice and a reasonable chance to comply; a board notice threatening immediate freeze is both unfair and complaint-generating.
Regulatory risk (blanket exclusion): 'not responsible for any delay caused due to technical reasons' is also redundant in form ('caused due to') and unenforceable in substance, since a bank cannot contract out of liability for its own service deficiency.
2. Rewrite only the greeting and the charge sentence so that the date and the revised charge are unambiguous, in no more than 35 words. State what you deliberately left out and why.
Read the worked answer
Rewrite (32 words): 'Dear Customer, With effect from 1 September 2025, the charge for issuing a demand draft of up to ₹1 lakh is ₹50 plus GST. The full schedule is on the notice board.'
What was left out and why:
- 'Valued Customer' - replaced with the neutral 'Dear Customer'; flattery immediately before a charge increase reads as insincere and adds words to a 90-word limit.
- 'w.e.f. 01.09' - replaced with the full date, because the legal effect of the revision depends on a date that cannot be misread.
- 'We wish to inform you that' - deleted as filler; the informative sentence does the work on its own.
- The delay-exclusion and freeze sentences do not belong in the opening at all: a notice should lead with the change, not with the bank's defences.
- 'The full schedule is on the notice board' replaces an invented statement that other charges are unchanged, which the branch cannot verify and must not promise.
3. Advise whether the sentence 'the bank is not responsible for any delay caused due to technical reasons' should be retained. Reason it out rather than quoting a rule.
Read the worked answer
It should be deleted.
First, a bank cannot by notice exclude liability for its own negligence or for a deficiency in service; a clause purporting to do so is not a defence, it is evidence of an intention to escape responsibility, which is exactly what an adjudicating authority reacts badly to.
Second, 'technical reasons' is undefined and in practice covers the bank's own systems - server downtime, failed uploads, a dead cheque-scanner. The bank would be disclaiming liability for the very failures it is obliged to prevent.
Third, on tone: a customer reading the board learns only that the bank has pre-emptively refused responsibility. That invites complaints and social-media screenshots, and it sits badly beside the same notice demanding KYC compliance from the customer.
Fourth, the sentence is redundant even on its own logic - delay caused by a customer's own error is already not the bank's responsibility; nothing needs to be disclaimed.
Replace it with a service commitment plus an escalation route, for example: 'We aim to process all requests on the same working day. If a systems outage affects service, we will display a notice and inform you of the alternative channel.'