Customer services / Operations team Experience

General Chat 💬
1

A bit of a long one and I am unfortunately not looking for community help as it is obviously a FT issue processing my funds, however I would certainly like to shine a light and receive feedback from Adam or Viktor regarding the performance of his customer services team/procedures and or processes, in my currently unresolved issue.

I would like to clarify I am completely happy with the platform and automated processes inplace, however as a leader of a company who prides itself on our USP of product specialisation and customer service delivery, even when capacity is at breaking point, incompetence or ignorance is never acceptable, and this excuse simply will not wash with me.

Transcripts of communication – to the money@freetrade.io email below, having raised the original issue on 8/2/20 through the app chat function.

Email no 1 – 15/02/20

Hi,

Just need a bit of help tracking and processing my top ups please.

Notes below,

£450.00 from 10/2/21 - correct ISA ref but added additional characters, which I believe threw it off.

£777.92 from today 15/2/21 - correct reference used, but will be first automatic top up in isa, not landed so far.

3 days ago, Ollie on the chat was very helpful in attempting to process a transfer to my isa, which was the original intention, but by the time he got in touch I had already processed a withdrawal.

It is my intention to sell alot of content in my GIA and rebuy in my ISA, but until I know my top up in my ISA works quickly and seamlessly I am incredibly apprehensive to sell off if it will increase the down time between holdings. Unfortunately the time critical element for me would be to have all top ups into the ISA before April, as I’m sure is the same story everywhere.

Please can you resolve and push through the ‘floating’ payments above and let me know if my second payment of £777.92 was processed correctly.

I have never had any problems with any GIA top ups and would hope the ISA process is the same.

Many thanks,

Email no 2 – 22/02/20

Hi,

I am still awaiting the £450 top up to my isa.

Please can you update me with a matter of urgency.

Regards,

Response from FT – 23/02/20

Hi Phillip,

Thanks for your patience here!

I’ve checked your account and can see that your deposit has reached your account earlier on today.

This will be reflected in your Activity feed in-app and you should have received a notification when it arrived too.

Bank transfers can take 2-4 working hours to reach your account and we process these between 8am and 8:30pm, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays). After business hours, your deposit will be processed the next day.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with!

Email reply – (3) – 23/02/20

Thanks for getting back to me.

The deposit I received today was for another deposit I sent through this morning for £430.00.

What I am missing, which Ollie managed to locate on 11th February is for £450.00.

This first payment of £450.00 was sent with additional characters after the ref number. Not fully understanding the automation of the deposit tracking, on the end of the manual reference number i added ‘ISA’ for my own records, which caused the issue.

The two subsequent deposits of £777.92 on 15th Feb and £430.00 today 23rd, were processed with the correct ref. and received in usual time.

So please can you help locate my £450.00

Many thanks,

Automated Response from FT – 23/02/20

I’ve located your deposit - don’t worry, your money is safe but it hasn’t been automatically applied to your Freetrade account I’m afraid

Sorry about this, it looks like the deposit has arrived with an incorrect reference. Not to worry, we’ll be able to manually apply the cash onto your account. If you head to account > top-up > bank transfer in the app you’ll see a Unique Reference, if you include this going forward it will arrive into your account automatically.

I’m going to pop this query over to our operations team now, who’ll be able to look into this further for you and get your money applied. The team will get back to you here, please do allow 7-10 working days but it’s usually sorted a lot quicker!

As your chat is being passed to another team’s queue, please start a new conversation with us if we can help with anything else

Note: this was the same response I received from my original communication through the app with the initial query.

Email reply – (4) – 23/02/20

I don’t think it is appropriate to receive the same message I received from another member of your team 12 days ago, to be told to wait another 7-10 days.

My current patience so far is surely deserving of a non automated response and a swift resolution. Please can you confirm the manual intervention will happen imminently.

Regards,

Automated Response from FT – 24/02/20

I’ll close out this chat now but please don’t hesitate to drop us a new message if we can help with anything else!

End of communication, except a strongly worded response to the closure of an unresolved issue.

So to conclude, my situation is still completely unresolved, and albeit the situation originally was my own fault, the performance of the customer service/operations team in resolving my issue has been incredibly poor.

Adam/Viktor do you have any comments?

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2

@Viktor
@adam

3

FT’s team publicly said last week that they are busy with making a massive improvement to the deposit process to avoid this kind of issues altogether.

4

I’m not sure if you’d get a direct response to a support related issue from the founders ( especially on a public forum)

I hope they do read your feedback to improve what is a frustrating process

5

I accept the initial problem was my own making. Subsequent deposits, done the correct way have been processed and received in usual time, that is not my complaint.

It is more the complete inaction and closing of the issue and level of ‘customer service’ which is compounding such an original small issue.

1 Like
6

Effectively, you’re asking to jump the queue and get special treatment. Almost no one else - relatively speaking - is complaining here. Be patient and reasonable. Venting might sound nice and make you feel better temporarily, but the backlog is what it is. They’ll get to you when they get to you. Complaining here is unlikely to elevate your issue and if it does, you’re cheating others by being loud and demanding attention.

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7

Trent,
Venting is always a last resort and I certainly loath to air dirty laundry.
But if you had taken the care to read the correspondence above you would see my query was acknowledged, dialogue entered and then not actioned and then put to the back of the queue again, without explanation. Do you think that is acceptable performance and deserving of further patience on my part?

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8

As much as I agree with everyone above, having a huge amount of money floating in the air is very annoying. FT is working tirelessly to solve these issues, however it’s only certain amount of patience that one can have if there is a large amount of money involved.
FT customer service is certainly struggling with the large amount of onboarded clients.
I have sent a message to them on the 10th of February, as a plus customer with priority support and no one even seen my message since. My issue luckily has solved itself since, but they wouldn’t know that because they haven’t seen my message.
So I’m sorry but I can see both sides here. It’s hard to be patient when you would like to invest your money but you can’t because it’s stuck in the air. And yes , you probably just need to be patient. As hard as it is. I’m sure they will make it up to you as soon as they can.

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9

Hi, I am quite new here. I am looking to find out my brokerage account number. Can anyone please help me with this?

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11

As someone confirmed in one of the other threads,
you need to reach out to customer services via Chat or email to get your account number which is supposedly different for ISA and GIA.

Cheers

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