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Let's Talk Credit Card Retention Offers

DrSaichand

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This is my first ever post in this community but I have been following TechnoFino team for long time so please pardon my mistakes if any and do correct me.

Banks spend a lot to gain a customer on their credit card portfolio. A lot of work goes behind Marketing, onboarding & maintaining a trustful customer who brings good revenue to the bank and most likely pay all the dues on time. But at times when customer want to break this relationship by closing the card, banks offer retention offers to make him stay with the bank. Though this sounds odd to few this is an ultimate trump card a credit card company plays to stop a leaving customer. Banks does this because it costs banks much less to offer incentives to leaving customer for their retention rather than the cost of accruing a new customer, that too in this competitive market. This also doesn't mean banks offer these offers to each and every customer that exploits this raw nerve.

Generally these offers are not published/discussed and further they vary from customer to customer based on their relationship with the lender. So I thought of initiating a thread to accumulate various credit card retention offers for long time so here we go please share your card retention offers of various banks credit cards under this thread so that we can better our portfolio further lets find out which bank goes a extra mile to retain their customer. Here's my retention offer.

YES BANK
**************
I have been with Yes Bank since 2017 and got Yes bank Unsecured credit card in the year 2018. Initially my card was Yes Rewards Credit card offered as a pre approved bases on my savings account and I had instantly accepted the offer as I was a student at that time. Yes Bank card being my first ever credit card, I got a credit limit of 20,000 and I was ok with it as my requirements were minimum.

By the time I graduated my usage and spends gradually increased and credit limit requirement started to rise. After the devaluation following the Yes Bank crisis the card offers and reward points were reduced to so low that it didn't made any sense to hold the Yes Bank Cards. In addition to that inspite of being loyal to bank and with absolute zero late payments Yes Bank used to offer poor credit limit enhancements of 3,000 - 5000 for every 8-12 months, but they offer credit card upgrades every 6 months so I was adjusted to it. last straw that broke the camels back was in the year 2021 I got my second credit card i.e Amazon Pay ICICI Credit card with the limit of 2,50,000 and instantly I called Yes bank to close my card as credit limit on my Yes Edge CC was 32,000 at the time of closure and I was hardly able to buy even a mid range phone with it under Bank offers (knowing card closure effects my credit score in bad way) they took the request and I thought card was closed.

but after 15-20 days later I got a call from their Credit card retention team and they offered me direct upgrade from Yes Edge CC to Yes First Preferred CC with 1000 rupees worth reward points in statement with absolutely zero annual fee. I was amazed and decided to remain with them. But eventually after a year due to my other banks cards portfolio I hold by the mid of 2022 I finally closed my Yes Bank card and Yes they again called me and tried to persuaded me to at least stay on card to avail longe benefits, but as I travel near to nill I have denied their 2nd time card retention offer and closed the card. my card closure is solely regarding my poor Credit Limit offered by the bank inspite being with them for almost three years.

SBI
*****

Yes you heard it right, SBI...!!! Suprisingly I also had good retention offer experience on SBI. My father applied for SBI Cashback card via website and as he is salaried, during initial launch of Cashback card there was a glitch for salaried people so SBI agent came home to collect documents. After all formalities they issued Simply save card fraudulently and we have followed up with the SBI customer care but no action was taken.

As my father already holds SBI Elite which is 3 years old, we requested them to close this Simply save card. Immediately within 30 minutes of raising card closure request SBI Card retention team called us and reverted annual fee of 500+18%GST and told to retain card, after 30 min of persuasion I have accepted for the same but my father was unaware of this.

But the immediate next month my father has placed card closure request without my knowledge and again card retention team contacted him and enquired why did we again placed card closure request inspite of annual fee refund for which he also asked them to deduct the fees again and close the card due to bad onboarding experience and he also told about the mis-selling issue and also explained Simply save variant is not that useful in the current card portfolio which he holds, after enquiring about all cards he is holding and spend pattern (which is quite wierd from their end) immediately they have credited 20,000 reward points even without asking in SBI Elite Card rewards account on call and asked to Check the same in the app they also promised that after 6 months variant change option will be enabled for Cashback card too so that we can change the existing simplysave to Cashback.

Being infamous for their slack nature SBI Card retention team gave good offers inspite of placing back to back card closure requests.
they reverted 499+18% GST = 588 (Annual Fees) and 20000 reward points = 5000 Rupees total of 5588

It took a while to understand this is for real 😛 🙂 But this doesn't warrant that SBI does the same with every customer as my father card has spends of 12L almost every year on Elite since a couple of years so that history might have helped him getting a good retention offer for the other card of SBI.


So that it here's my experience of Card retention offer with Yes Bank and SBI do share yours if you have any in the thread below. Sorry for the long post in advance.
 
Last edited:
SBI: I put card closure request for Simply CLICK on 5th Feb., immediately they called within 1 minute. Told already have CASHBACK and BPCL, my requirements are getting fulfilled.
Spends: 2L done already before the renewal, renewal is in March 2023.
Age: 2 years, Verdict: Converted to LTF.
How to confirm whether it is converted to LTF?
 
SBI: I put card closure request for Simply CLICK on 5th Feb., immediately they called within 1 minute. Told already have CASHBACK and BPCL, my requirements are getting fulfilled.
Spends: 2L done already before the renewal, renewal is in March 2023.
Age: 2 years, Verdict: Converted to LTF.
Can u share process you followed to get cashback card when you already had simplyclick. what limit they gave in cashback when you were existing simplyclick holder.
 
Can u share process you followed to get cashback card when you already had simplyclick. what limit they gave in cashback when you were existing simplyclick holder.
Applied through sprint. East breeze process, gave detailes, CIBIL Hit, Digilocker AADHAR verification, Rs. 1 Credit & Debit through Net banking, Uploaded Photo and Card got instantly generated, took max 30 minutes. Applied on 20th December.
Limit 10K (But Separate, Not deducted from Simply CLICK) 😂, transferred limit from Simply CLICK to CASHBACK.
 
This is my first ever post in this community but I have been following TechnoFino team for long time so please pardon my mistakes if any and do correct me.

Banks spend a lot to gain a customer on their credit card portfolio. A lot of work goes behind Marketing, onboarding & maintaining a trustful customer who brings good revenue to the bank and most likely pay all the dues on time. But at times when customer want to break this relationship by closing the card, banks offer retention offers to make him stay with the bank. Though this sounds odd to few this is an ultimate trump card a credit card company plays to stop a leaving customer. Banks does this because it costs banks much less to offer incentives to leaving customer for their retention rather than the cost of accruing a new customer, that too in this competitive market. This also doesn't mean banks offer these offers to each and every customer that exploits this raw nerve.

Generally these offers are not published/discussed and further they vary from customer to customer based on their relationship with the lender. So I thought of initiating a thread to accumulate various credit card retention offers for long time so here we go please share your card retention offers of various banks credit cards under this thread so that we can better our portfolio further lets find out which bank goes a extra mile to retain their customer. Here's my retention offer.

YES BANK
**************
I have been with Yes Bank since 2017 and got Yes bank Unsecured credit card in the year 2018. Initially my card was Yes Rewards Credit card offered as a pre approved bases on my savings account and I had instantly accepted the offer as I was a student at that time. Yes Bank card being my first ever credit card, I got a credit limit of 20,000 and I was ok with it as my requirements were minimum.

By the time I graduated my usage and spends gradually increased and credit limit requirement started to rise. After the devaluation following the Yes Bank crisis the card offers and reward points were reduced to so low that it didn't made any sense to hold the Yes Bank Cards. In addition to that inspite of being loyal to bank and with absolute zero late payments Yes Bank used to offer poor credit limit enhancements of 3,000 - 5000 for every 8-12 months, but they offer credit card upgrades every 6 months so I was adjusted to it. last straw that broke the camels back was in the year 2021 I got my second credit card i.e Amazon Pay ICICI Credit card with the limit of 2,50,000 and instantly I called Yes bank to close my card as credit limit on my Yes Edge CC was 32,000 at the time of closure and I was hardly able to buy even a mid range phone with it under Bank offers (knowing card closure effects my credit score in bad way) they took the request and I thought card was closed.

but after 15-20 days later I got a call from their Credit card retention team and they offered me direct upgrade from Yes Edge CC to Yes First Preferred CC with 1000 rupees worth reward points in statement with absolutely zero annual fee. I was amazed and decided to remain with them. But eventually after a year due to my other banks cards portfolio I hold by the mid of 2022 I finally closed my Yes Bank card and Yes they again called me and tried to persuaded me to at least stay on card to avail longe benefits, but as I travel near to nill I have denied their 2nd time card retention offer and closed the card. my card closure is solely regarding my poor Credit Limit offered by the bank inspite being with them for almost three years.

SBI
*****

Yes you heard it right, SBI...!!! Suprisingly I also had good retention offer experience on SBI. My father applied for SBI Cashback card via website and as he is salaried, during initial launch of Cashback card there was a glitch for salaried people so SBI agent came home to collect documents. After all formalities they issued Simply save card fraudulently and we have followed up with the SBI customer care but no action was taken.

As my father already holds SBI Elite which is 3 years old, we requested them to close this Simply save card. Immediately within 30 minutes of raising card closure request SBI Card retention team called us and reverted annual fee of 500+18%GST and told to retain card, after 30 min of persuasion I have accepted for the same but my father was unaware of this.

But the immediate next month my father has placed card closure request without my knowledge and again card retention team contacted him and enquired why did we again placed card closure request inspite of annual fee refund for which he also asked them to deduct the fees again and close the card due to bad onboarding experience and he also told about the mis-selling issue and also explained Simply save variant is not that useful in the current card portfolio which he holds, after enquiring about all cards he is holding and spend pattern (which is quite wierd from their end) immediately they have credited 20,000 reward points even without asking in SBI Elite Card rewards account on call and asked to Check the same in the app they also promised that after 6 months variant change option will be enabled for Cashback card too so that we can change the existing simplysave to Cashback.

Being infamous for their slack nature SBI Card retention team gave good offers inspite of placing back to back card closure requests.
they reverted 499+18% GST = 588 (Annual Fees) and 20000 reward points = 5000 Rupees total of 5588

It took a while to understand this is for real 😛 🙂 But this doesn't warrant that SBI does the same with every customer as my father card has spends of 12L almost every year on Elite since a couple of years so that history might have helped him getting a good retention offer for the other card of SBI.


So that it here's my experience of Card retention offer with Yes Bank and SBI do share yours if you have any in the thread below. Sorry for the long post in advance.
Wrote PNO for LTF Flipkart Axis Card but they denied and asked them to close the card. Received call from Retention team and they agreed to provide 2500 edge points. So will keep card for another year might get Limit enhancement in few months.
 
@DrSaichand Were your Yes Bank CCs Lifetime free (LTF)? You didn't mention that. Or later made LTF as part of the upgrades? 🙂

I recently closed my SBI SimplyCLICK because they sent me SMS offer "Get additional SBI Prime or SBI SimplySAVE plus ₹1000 gift voucher". But due to some technical error, the offer couldn't be fulfilled. I raised issue with customer care, escalated it to Nodal officer > PNO >Customer Service Head but they all gave only robot copy-paste replies for 2 months till the offer expired and didn't even understand the issue, let alone care about addressing it. So I raised request to close SimplyCLICK because I was angry. Got a call to reverse SimplyCLICK charges for 1 year but given recent experience about not fulfilling offer, I no longer trusted them to reverse charges either so closed the card anyway.
My Yes bank card was always LTF from beginning
 
I recently canceled my Axis select card since I got Magnus, the retention team offered my 7500 edge rewards as a retention benefit, however, I closed it and it was done immediately over call.
 
I got a retention offer from SBI for my Prime card. I asked them to make it LTF, but instead, they gave me a statement credit of Rs 3000. As my yearly fee was already waived off because of the spending I made in the previous year, I got 3k for free!
On my Citi Rewards card, I was given a statement credit of Rs 1000 when I requested them to close my card. Even Citi did not agree to make the card LTF.
Both of these happened in Oct 22
 
I tried to close my SBI Tata card and Citi Rewards card this month.

For SBI Tata, offered 500 credit to compensate the annual fee to be charged in next statement cycle, I accpeted it for now, and it has even been credited to my card account with even the GST amount - which naturally will cancel out the annual fee exactly.

For Citi Rewards, they offered 1000 credit directly although I was asking for a LTF Axis Rewards - they said currently it's not possible and will take some time for their systems to work out these things.
So for now I took the free 1k, as I've already spent 30k so the annual fee won't be charged anyway.

One thing I must say is that there is a noticeable difference in attending customers by closure and retention teams of the two banks.

Citi team was very professional and efficient, in one call itself, they directly connected to the next department responsible and retention offer and everything was completed in just one call in about 10 minutes.

SBI team on the other hand was totally opposite.
One idiot guy annoyed me for 4-5 days, called 3 times, every time asked the reason for closure, didn't make any proper retention offer, talked about some usual gibberish - infact the guy was so poor in his job that he couldn't even frame correct meaningful sentences in either Hindi or English and talked with an absolutely horrible diction. Don't know how he got his job honestly.
4th time just on the day before 7th day was to be up, a lady called and she brusquely offered the annual fee recompense and completed the process quickly.
 
How you dodged first 3 times, I mean what if he closed when you said no or what you said actually so that you received another call. Based on my surroundings people usually get 1-2 calls only and then card closure notification, if not accepted whatever they offered. Not sure how you dodged 4 times.
you see basically that first guy was a total nincompoop

he was not capable of doing anything decisive
neither he made a proper retention offer nor he said he will close the card
only useful information he sprouted out of the gibberish was that I will get a final call from the closure team when the closure happens
so I was kinda relaxed in that regard
 
I also want to try it with Axis for the flipkart card
But kind of hesitating because of Axis being Axis they might close the card without any ado
add to the fact that the flipkart card is a popular one
 
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