It has been nearly a 12 months since a 20-year-old Robinhood person dedicated suicide, largely due to the corporate’s appalling customer support, in response to his household. Regardless of the tragedy, issues doesn’t seem to be higher.

Amy Vickers, who was annoyed that Robinhood would stop her from promoting her shares in GameStop on January 28, started the method of transferring her shares to Constancy Investments…. Robinhood instructed him the method would take 5 to seven days, but it surely wasn’t till February 16 that the final of his actions arrived at Constancy. By that point, his GameStop shares had misplaced a lot of their worth.

“I spent lots of days mendacity in my mattress feeling depressed,” stated Ms. Vickers of Austin, Texas. “Robinhood is the least skilled firm I’ve ever handled managing my cash.”

It is not simply the identical inventory merchants, both: purchasers complain about accounts locked for greater than a month, requiring dozens of emails (there isn’t a buyer assist over the cellphone, at besides some choices buying and selling customers) to resolve. Whereas such a centrally situated consumer got here up with a helpful hack: After an unsuccessful month of back-and-forth with Robinhood, together with her model failing to fulfill her personal deadlines, Brenton Place started tweeting about it with an unfavorable hashtag. It solved issues in per week, at breakneck velocity by Robinhood requirements.

To be truthful to Robinhood, he could not fairly have predicted the skyrocketing person base and quantity that accompanied the GameStop mania in January.

“If in case you have a 350% enhance in quantity in a single day, there simply aren’t sufficient people to deal with the issue to have the ability to present efficient assist,” Mr. Mesa…. Within the final week of January alone, Robinhood acquired as many buyer assist tickets because it usually receives in three months, Mr. Mesa stated. In response, the corporate reassigned numerous engineers to work on and roll out customer support enhancements, and it largely cleared its backlog of points at first of March, he added.

And, on the great aspect of the enterprise, poor piss-poor customer support like this does not appear to matter on the actually essential issues just like the IPO.

Robinhood has a customer support challenge [WSJ]

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