Interactive Brokers Rude Customer Service
- Thread starter surfer25
- Start date
Trade count got nothing to do with it.
Its size that matters
Just 10 quck in-out trades a day for 1,000 ES contracts each, and your broker going to love you.
Having 4 accts with IB, they aren't too bad. Problem is technical desk, is a hit and a miss. No one seems to be able to answer why I have discrepancy's with three data streams and IB's that is never correct, or at least in unison with the others, 8-12cents makes a difference. Also, refresh with Ensign and IB data, seems unobtainable, unfortunately, I am looking for a different data stream for Ensign, any recommendations would be appreciated.
I've been with IB several years, and my customer service experience has been mixed. I call them maybe 4-5 times a year. The last few times I called IB, customer service had improved and I was treated professionally and well. No friendly chit chat though. They don't have time for that, and that is fine with me.
As for their chat, I've never had a good experience with it. The people on chat never seem to understand a problem and are rarely able to fix it.
Ticket responses? Very slow and often misunderstood and IB doesn't communicate well or efficiently with their ticket system.
Further, customer service isn't what it use to be. I'm an older person and I've seen customer service decline with all companies over the decades. Decades ago, most companies treated you like "the customer is always right". Whether they believed you were right or not was not the point. The point was they treated you like you were right and showed you respect. Sadly, most companies don't do this anymore.
That's my take, fwiw.
As for their chat, I've never had a good experience with it. The people on chat never seem to understand a problem and are rarely able to fix it.
Ticket responses? Very slow and often misunderstood and IB doesn't communicate well or efficiently with their ticket system.
Further, customer service isn't what it use to be. I'm an older person and I've seen customer service decline with all companies over the decades. Decades ago, most companies treated you like "the customer is always right". Whether they believed you were right or not was not the point. The point was they treated you like you were right and showed you respect. Sadly, most companies don't do this anymore.
That's my take, fwiw.
I need to call them once every year or two when an option order gets stuck, e.g. an order is magenta or light blue meaning it didn't get acknowledged.
My advice in general is, if you don't like the response IB gives you, just try again.
Last year, I had an order to close out VIX options get stuck when I tried to change the limit price. I called and asked if the order could be fixed or cleared, the rep said that the order probably didn't get to the exchange and would get reset that night. Since the options were expiring the next day, I didn't want to be unable to trade them. So I used the chat and asked the same question. The rep asked me if I'd like her to call the exchange to get the order cleared, I said yes, and she did it.
There seems to be competition for new customers, which is why a lot of brokerages give bonuses like a month of free trades, but once people are with a brokerage there seems to be fairly high inertia. This would explain why TDAmeritrade maintains its DART numbers despite its not-infrequent data feed outages. And IB doesn't really have any competition for its low option commissions (except maybe Lightspeed), so I'm going to stick with them regardless of how responsive their customer service is.
If you just keep $500 worth of cash or other with a Scottrade account you can use their streaming quotes for free, which I think works well.
Then you can trade elsewhere for less while you watch their ticker.