Please Use Our ATMs, Says Postal Department

BENGALURU: The Department of Posts, which has been on a modernising spree, has an unusual request to ask of customers who bank with it. “Please use our ATMs. Cards are not being used at all,” says Chief Postmaster General Usha Chandrasekhar.

She has good reason to make the request. The Postal Department, which started its Core Banking Solutions (CBS) from January this year, now operates 18 ATMs in Karnataka (eight of them in Bengaluru) and the number is going to be scaled to 58 soon. Their problem is that customers are not really using the ATMs.

“Our ATMs are conveniently located at main branches and are filled with money. But we find that many customers prefer to enter the post office, sit down, chat with everyone and generally spend some time there. We don’t mind serving our customers at the counters when they withdraw money, but now with a wider range of services being offered, we would like to ensure that the waiting time is also less for people who have to avail other services,” she told Express.

The department has been facing some complaints after having adopted CBS. The main problem is the tendency of staffers to respond with a generic “the server is down” comment to customers who would have waited in queue for hours.

Admitting that there have been problems and that they are trying to streamline the system, Usha Chandrasekhar said, “Teething problems are quite common but we hope to stabilise everything by March 2016.”

Taking the example of a leading public sector bank that had to stop CBS for two months due to repeated

hiccups, Postmaster General of Business Development Veena Srinivas said, “We are facing some problems but we have not had to stop operations and our employees have shown far greater enthusiasm in adopting the software.”

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