Joel,
I tend to agree with most of your assessment of Discover, although I have never had anyone be outright rude to me, so far.
This was not one of their better days.
I tried to logon at 6:50 this morning. Everything was running super slow. I was not able to get my first quote until 7:15, at which time their system seemed to be running at normal speed again. (I have a DSL connection)
About 7:25 I tried to place a buy order. I submitted it and got the following message back after about a two minute wait:
Sybase message 1205,Severity 13, state 1 Server 'DTS_UT' Procedure 'insertSafely' Line 59 Your server command (process id #200) was deadlocked with another process and been chosen as deadlock victim. Re-run your command.
Error processing order.
Please resubmit you order
Well this was the first time I had seen this message so I resubmitted the order again and got the same error message again.
At 7:42 I called the Trading Desk and was placed in the wait queue for the next available rep. It took 29 minutes for someone to take the call. By that time the stock I was going to buy had gone up substantially. So I had a "nice little chat" with their rep for the next ten minutes.
As is my style, I kept things civil. But I made my point to the rep about the reliability of their system. He was very apologetic the whole time. I expressed my concerns about the situation: System failures are going to happen regardless of how well designed the system is. Waiting 29 minutes to talk to someone is not acceptable. And this was a normal volume day. What are we to do on a high volume day?
At no time was there a message on their site indicating that there was a serious problem with the service. That is not an acceptable practice. I have spent the last 25 years working as a computer professional. If you want to lose a customer, keep them in the dark.
I followed this call up with another to Technical Support. The call was answered with a wait of less than a minute. Since I fully understand the meaning the above error message I was able to querry them about what was going on. A program change had been made and the programmers were still trying to figure out what went wrong. Obviously they didn't test it fully before going live with it. I repeated the same concerns I had expressed earlier with the Trading Desk rep. But this Tech Support rep has only been with Discover for 6 months. I really don't expect much in the way of results.
At this point I do not see this situation getting any better soon. Discover needs to start opening up the lines of communications. Not informing us about obvious problems is not a good sign. We need to know what they are doing about these problems. If they continue to add more customers, this situation will only get worse.
Up till now, with the exception of the downtime, I have been reasonably satisfied with the service. But I see a trend which I do not like and will be looking elsewhere.
Currently I only execute 5 to 10 trades a month, so I don't need Level 2 displays and the like. But I do need realtime quotes and graphs as well as prompt confirmations. A reliable system, even during market events, is at the top of my list. If anyone would like to suggest possible replacements, please respond. All I ask is that you have personal experience with the brokerage.
Regards,
Jim |
