As online brokerage ETrade continued to experience service interruptions Thursday, increasingly frustrated customers vented their anger at the company's inability to fix technical glitches and longstanding customer-service problems.
"They keep saying that it's a nothing problem," said Eric Chiu, a customer of the No. 2 Web brokerage. "It's ridiculous."
Chiu said he lost money on Wednesday because he could not cancel orders on the system while it was down. When he logged on to the site on Thursday morning, he still couldn't access the trading portion of the site. "This feature is temporarily unavailable," read the error message.
Chiu said that the company's official statement, which said the site was down for two hours yesterday, was misleading. Some functions may be up again, but other critical ones are still down.
"They've got to be kidding," Chiu said. "If they're going to take people's life savings, they need a system that can scale, and they consistently show that they can't scale to support their customers."
In the wake of the problems, ETrade (EGRP) officials continued to defend their customer-service approach. The Palo Alto, California, company has added about 300 telephone customer-support employees since November, bringing the total to about 500, said Lisa Nash, vice president of customer service.
When asked whether the company would add more phone support, Nash would not commit to a number, saying the company's focus will continue to be on electronic support features, such as chat and email.
"If the volumes continue, we will continue to expand and we will continue to look at ways to help customers electronically," Nash said Wednesday.
But in a world where split-second decisions are critical, electronic support won't suffice, angry customers say. Chiu sent several emails to ETrade Wednesday, but was still waiting to hear from the company on Thursday. When he tried calling, Chiu was put on hold for 30 minutes before being told by a customer-service representative that "it would be better to call back at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning."
Wired News dialed ETrade's customer-service phone number for 30 minutes on Thursday morning, but received busy signals.
Meanwhile, ETrade customers say the company is struggling to provide the same kind of hand-holding that traditional brokerages offer, even as ETrade makes fun of smarmy stock brokers in its nationwide television advertising campaign.
