The Travancore State Bank Employees’ Association (TSBEA) has expressed concerns about a proposed move by State Bank of India’s Kerala Circle to constitute a multi-product sales force (MPSF) as it entails shifting of staff from transaction-based activity at branches to marketing based activity.

KS Krishna, General Secretary (GS), TSBEA, said that moving staff from the branch-counters and deploying them for marketing raises serious concerns as it could have an adverse impact on the smooth functioning of the branches, the quality of customer service, and the work-life balance of the employees.

The proposed MPSF is expected to drive focussed marketing of all products throughout SBI’s Circle. By shifting staff from transaction-based activity to marketing-based activity, the bank envisages improvement in its footprint in the market.

Each “cluster” of the bank in the Circle will have minimum 3 award staff—junior associate/ associate/ senior associate, and a scale I/II officer as the team leader. Besides their existing roles, team leaders will have additional responsibilities of MPSF.

MPSF will work on hub-and-spoke model. Hub branch will be the branch where the team head is currently posted. All the identified members will be doing activities from hub branches

According to the MPSF model, staff identified for the sales team will do only the activities as per daily activity list. They will not be used for the purpose of transactional business.

Futher, all teams across the circle will do the marketing activity of a particular product on a particular day. A tracker will be created to monitor progress of the activities.

Krishna observed that core business of the bank is still based in branches. So, retention and expansion of business could be ensured through efficient services at the branches.

“Bank’s branches are visible and credible centers of service to the customers rendered by the workforce,” he said.

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