"The customer-rating exercise is an effort to create awareness among banks and is not a set of regulations from the apex bank," chief general manager of RBI's department of banking supervision (DBS) AQ Siddiqui said.

A circular issued earlier this month by the DBS to IBA said that the model was put up to the board of financial supervision (BFS) where the RBI governor, while approving the model, directed that the same be forwarded to the IBA for customisation and adoption. "IBA is expected to conduct the survey for all its members, including private sector and foreign banks,"Siddiqi said.

"BFS has agreed that for the purpose of such a survey, the banks may be split into two groups and each group may be subjected to a survey every two years so that each bank gets covered once in four years," the circular said, adding that about 10 per cent of a bank's branches will be covered for the survey.

An IBA spokesperson said that RBI has asked the association to evolve the norms for selection of bank branches for the survey. "Although the apex bank has not set a dateline for the start of this exercise, IBA aims to initiate the survey as soon as it is able to customise the model and tie-up with the National Institute of Bank management (NIBM) and five other agencies identified for the purpose of carring out the exercise," the IBA spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, for the purpose of rating a bank's customer service, the rating model has clubbed a bank's various service aspects into five broad groups. They are speed and efficiency (counter service as well as back office); space, amenitiesand employee behaviour; credit aspects; foreign exchange business aspects; management aspects.

"During the course of inspection, an inspection officer (IO) designated by the IBA, will put a list of around 49 questions -- on the service items in the first four groups-- to the branch manager. Based on the information furnished by the branch manager, the IO will give marks on a scale of 1 to 5 and thereafter the IO should verify this information by scrutinising cases from the branch records, and interviewing customers selected at random," the circular said.

The rating model has assigned different weightages to the different service groups, based on which the head office for each bank will be rated. "Once the branch ratings are completed, the rating reports should be made available to the principal inspecting officer of RBI who is inspecting the bank. The management aspects of the bank will then be rated by the principal inspecting officer to arrive at a composite rating for the bank," the circularsaid.