PNB facilitates balance enquiry via missed call

“Missed Call” the uniquely Indian innovation has found new legitimacy of sorts at Punjab National Bank. Given how a large number of Indians like to give missed calls so as to indicate to the party at the other end to call back, the bank has devised a simple mechanism which exploits the trait in a unique manner.
The public sector lender has launched a service which allows its customers to find out their savings account balance by giving the bank a “missed call”.

All the customers have to do in order to know their savings account balance is dial the bank’s customer care at either 18001802222 or 01202490000 and give no more than three rings using their registered mobile phone numbers. Immediately after receiving the missed call, the system at the bank’s end sends the details of the accounts balance via an SMS.

The facility is an extension of the bank’s recently launched SMS-based alert service which has received an extremely favorable response from the customers, says the bank.

While PNB is perhaps the first bank in the country to exploit the missed call phenomenon, there have a few examples albeit outside the realm of banking and financial services sector, which indicate that the missed call culture may soon go mainstream in the enterprise.

Sangeetha Mobiles, a retailer with one of the country’s largest chain of mobile stores for instance uses a customized solution which enables prospective customers to get in touch with the mobile retailer via missed calls. Also, there have been reports of mobile application developers working on apps which can incorporate missed calls as a standard type of messaging like a text or even a regular call.