Do you know why Etrade customer service is so bad? Well, you are at the perfect place to find the answer to such a question.
There are very few industries trust and reassurances are more important than those that are involved in trading and investments. When you’re putting your own money in someone else’s hands, you want the best support possible, so why is E*TRADE customer service so bad?
E*TRADE customer service has received a lot of negative responses from customers due to frequent issues and errors, slow response times, and poor usability.
In this article we will detail the main reasons why people are so unhappy with customer service at E*TRADE so that you can decide whether they are worth avoiding for yourself.
What Is E*TRADE?
Before we get into the specifics of their customer service issues, we need to explain a little bit about what the company does and where they come from.
E-Trade Financial Corporation (Often written as E*TRADE or ETrade) is an online trading platform for investments that is owned by Morgan Stanley. The business started life all the way back in 1982 under the name TradePlus and grew rapidly.
Over the years, they have changed hands many times and been through multiple different iterations. In 2020, E*TRADE was acquired by Morgan Stanley, and it now operates as a financial services subsidiary of the company. Many people believe that a lot of their more egregious customer service issues have sprung up since this acquisition.
Does E*TRADE Customer Service Have A Bad Reputation?
Sometimes you might hear some negative things about a company and wonder whether or not they are a true reflection of the experience you would have.
It might just be a few disgruntled responders or perhaps an unfair and outdated reputation based on mistakes they have made in the past.
So, what kind of reviews is E*TRADE customer service actually getting today?
In short: it’s not good. On Trustpilot, 88% of the reviews for E*TRADE are 1-star only, making their overall score just 1.3 out of 5. The vast majority of these negative reviews reference bad customer support experiences in some way.
Over at topratedfirms.com, they have an overall score of just 2 out of 5 and on sitejabber things aren’t much better – with their average being 2.35 out of 5 from over 200 different responses. This means that they rank 79th out of the 80 online brokerage businesses that the platform analyses.
So, what is it that they are actually doing wrong? Why are people so unhappy with what they are getting when they use E*TRADE?
5 Reasons Why E*TRADE Customer Service Is So Bad
1. It’s Hard To Get A Response
The first, and the most important, thing that any customer service system needs to be able to provide is an actual response.
In the digital age (and particularly for an online company like E*TRADE), you expect to be able to hear back about any kind of query relatively quickly.
With E*TRADE, customers often can’t speak to a representative without waiting on the phone for 30 minutes or more. This is one of the cardinal sins of customer service, especially when money and timely investments are at stake.
If something happens in the trading industry, you need to be able to react quickly, and that’s not possible when you’re sitting around listening to on-hold music for 45 minutes just to talk to someone.
2. Fixes And Support Take Forever
Even if you are lucky enough to get in touch with someone at E*TRADE, don’t expect your problem to be solved in a timely manner.
At E*TRADE, people have been forced to wait weeks to get new cards delivered and months to get access back to their accounts. This can mean that you will be completely cut off from the money that you’ve invested, and any and all trades that you are participating in.
For any industry, this would be frustrating. It is your financial accounts, though, it is even more unacceptable that you can be locked out and left waiting for any length of time at all.
3. The Service Has Many Problems
How hard it is to get in touch with E*TRADE and have any issues resolved might not be such a big deal if there weren’t so many problems in the first place.
Many people have reported trades that don’t go through, system glitches that cause whole investments to fail, and a lot of similar errors and problems with the whole service.
You want to know that you can trust a service that is supposed to look after your money as any small error when you are trading can have huge financial implications.
4. It Is Hard To Use
One of the most basic things that you might expect as a customer is simply being able to use the service in the first place.
The E*TRADE app and website are difficult to use and unintuitive. They make it complicated to find the information that you might need – even basic figures on your balance and your investment capital. It’s slow and painful to just set up an account in the first place.
Trying to work your way around their site can be an incredibly frustrating experience, which might be enough to put you off before you even get a foot in the door.
5. It Is Hard To Get Your Money Out
At the end of the day, being able to actually withdraw your investments from a trading service has to be one of the most essential services that they can provide.
It’s your money, so you should have quick and easy access to it.
At E*TRADE, they make it difficult to actually access your own money. They will reportedly threaten to report withdrawals to the IRS as premature distributions, and it can take months of painful back and forth to get them to release funds when they find any sort of roadblock.
Essentially: if you want your money to be readily available to you, E*TRADE is not a trading service that you want to be using.
Summary
So, why is E*TRADE customer service so bad?
Not only do people find the service itself (and the app and website) complicated and difficult to navigate, but they also find a lot of issues with investing and moving money around.
Significant and worrying problems are a common occurrence with E*TRADE – and it’s hard to get any kind of response or fix from the customer support team when they do happen.
You need to be cautious about who you work with and where money is involved, and E*TRADE seems to be building a very negative reputation.