Customer Service and Grievance Handling
This domain tests fair treatment, transparency, complaint handling, and escalation. The exam expects a process: receive, acknowledge, investigate, resolve, communicate, record, and fix the root cause. It also expects awareness of vulnerable customers and the limits of what a branch can promise.
Core rules and concepts
- Publish a service charter with charges, turnaround times, and complaint channels. Do not impose undisclosed fees.
- Log every complaint with a unique ID, date, product, branch, and owner. A verbal promise is not a record.
- Acknowledge promptly and resolve within the stated timeframe; if more time is needed, tell the customer why and when.
- Investigate using records, not recollection. Reverse erroneous debits with value date where appropriate; explain compensation policy.
- Escalate unresolved or serious complaints to senior management and, where the customer remains dissatisfied, inform them of the NRB or other external escalation route.
- Analyse complaint trends and fix the process that caused them.
Worked example
A customer reports a duplicate debit of NPR 12,000 from an ATM withdrawal. The branch logs the complaint, checks the switch and ATM journal, confirms a timeout reversal did not post, and reverses the entry within three working days. If the bank’s charter promises a shorter turnaround and the delay caused charges, the compensation policy is applied. The root cause-an unreconciled ATM exception-is fixed, not just the single account.
Traps
No complaint ID, blaming the customer before checking logs, missing the published deadline without explanation, reversing without a value date, and closing the ticket without root-cause action.