A bit of a moan and a way to improve a poor customer experience felt today by someone I referred.
I have helped someone set up an FT ISA and they added ÂŁ8K yesterday to start and today I went to help them learn the app etc and set up an excel sheet for them with another ÂŁ12k to hit the ÂŁ20k ISA limit plus an extra ÂŁ10k to go into their GIA.
They went to put in the remaining ÂŁ12k to their ISA and it auto routed into their GIA as they were over the limit without any options to review amounts etc. Turns out the ÂŁ1 bank verification was done in the ISA and we missed that it had.
My idea may seem small but just put an option to review the limit options and either send the £11999 (or whatever the amount may be in another example) to ISA and the £1 to GIA or fail the transaction. After “Freda” the robot didn’t answer we got through to a member of staff who said that it would take 1-2 working days to transfer into ISA. This has meant that I wasted a day set aside to help them and after I complained about the above they said it will probably go through today but possible 1-2 days.
My idea is simply don’t re-route money to a different account without HUGE warnings/confirmations etc. Apart from embarrassing me after massively bigging up FT it is not a great customer reaction to find they have to wait for an action that FT did for new customers.
Like I said it is a small thing but avoids a bad experience and simply shouldn’t happen.
Yes they went £1 over as they forgot the £1 bank verification had been sent when setting up a linked bank to the account the day before so the App auto routed the whole amount to GIA. It did say why it did it but that was no good now the money couldn’t be touched. This meant we couldn’t invest this morning as planned and was TBH embarrassing after my good words to convince them FT was the place to do it
It is a small fix but an impactful negative user experience which could/should be avoided. I actually almost blamed them for maybe missing a warning as I thought it shouldn’t be possible to send money to a place not requested but they assured me it didn’t.
And just to add, the FT team responded quickly in-app Just felt I needed to add that as many claim they don’t get a response on deposit issues but I do find they reply fairly quick and are always super polite/friendly even if the answer is not what expected so it is NOT a criticism of the staff at all and just the system.
Update - So the friend I mentioned above did get their money moved from the GIA to the ISA by the end of the day but too late to invest. Although they were really annoyed that the money was automatically sent to an account without their permission they do love the options of Plus and the ISA etc.
Please FT modify the system so it doesn’t automatically decide that you want to send it to another account without permission that you can’t get moved/returned instantly. It seems very odd to allow this to happen and could have resulted in the loss of a decent long term customer if that was their first experience and they didn’t have a huge pro-FT person telling them it was all good but just to be patient
