By Andrew Irumba
Kampala:A tour and guide guru,who happens to be a customer to dfcu bank has dissed the troubled bank over alleged poor customer care service.
Hidaya Ahmed, who claims to have been mistreated at dfcu bank recently at Acacia branch by errant and arrogant bank staff took to her Facebook page on Friday and vented her seething anger thus; “So I do have a scenario with this annoying Bank! #DFCUbank i already have a shillings account with them which i opened up from Wilson branch for many years now and i did not have any problem with their services until when i decided to open up a $ account with them just recently, it is a company account to be exact. I am, in tours and travel business, Managing Director of #Arlanda Tours and travel Ltd and for convenience purposes i decided to change my company account from another bank to DFCU bank Acacia branch.
Ofcourse all banks have their requirements and i did provide each of every document that they requested for. They did open the account with ease and they said it was okay for clients to deposit money but i cannot withdraw the money until after about 2weeks, now that was okay with me. Problem is here, i do confirm a tour with my client from Germany and they decide to send through the money for Gorilla trekking safari likely to take place in July. They did the transactions and in our business, communication with clients is very crucial, client kept asking whether i had received the money,i keep following up with my bank and guess what?! These chaps can’t give me details of the account until i provide the source of the money, i let the the clients know about this and he sent me a transaction sheet indicating what the money was going to be used for, clearly for a Gorilla safari in Uganda, the number of days to be spent on the tour, full details of the client's names and address….
Well, i presented the transaction sheet at the bank and they still say it’s not enough…so i wrote an introductory letter to these guys, clearly stating i am a fully registered tour operator also associated with recognized organisations like Association of Uganda Tour Operators and i do have a trading licence, which i had already given to them btw as well as the certificate of incorperation and all other documents. Meanwhile these guys failed to explain in details what they meant by quotation, source of money; so i really failed to understand what they really wanted and each time i had to present anything i used my fuel as i was being tossed up and down! They This particular branch DFCU acacia, they dont pick up their office phone if you want to inquire anything, so either i had to go there in person or send one there and if you request to talk to them on the phone, they say they have nothing more to explain so they dont have time to talk to me. This particular light skinned lady, whatever her name is… at least that’s what she told my office messenger!
Then the very guy Patrick, who opened up my account is always too busy! they dont follow up at all so the entire time i needed assistance from the bank i totally got zero assistance from there, i contacted another person from a different DFCU branch, the one where i opened up my shillings account from and it is this person who provided me with detailed information on what exactly they needed like the emails i had with the client, his passport and so on… it is this person who also helped me check whether the money had reflected on the account or not. I kept on explaining the issues i have at the acacia branch so he did everything he could to help, he forwarded me his email where i forwarded my email conversations with the client for follow up.
By the time he forwarded all this to them, they had bounced back the money to the client. They didnt contact me at all or follow up with me about anything up to now. I just found out about this through another branch. My questions now, if at all the bank is uncertain the company is not authentic, or they never trusted the company documents, why in the first place did they accept to open up this account???!
why do they wait for transactions to first take place, then they start tossing us up and down. if only they had explained what i should expect before opening up the account may be this wouldn't be necessary. Okay, all Tour operators know how busy some seasons are and i had used my personal funds to Make these advanced bookings because i knew the money was already on the account. I bet these guys do not know what harm they have done to my company in terms of reputation. What if the client doubts our company and they never get to resend the money at all or do this trip. Remember, we just walked out of a kidnapping crisis which affected our Tourism reputation as a country, and then this crap!!! What's wrong with people fixing themselves in doing services that they cant even deliver!!! please guys, fellow operators Amos Wekesa, Francis Kimbowa what do you say about this, may be i'm the wrong one here! how do you handle such cases?! because the Anger i have, i wish these guys knew how much effort we put in marketing and getting clients. Convenience banking has instead turned into Total inconvenience.”
This is not the first time customers are bashing dfcu bank over poor service,a number of customers have previously complained over long queues in the bank with limited customer care.
