There's an undercurrent of rudeness from the eSignal support staff. I think they need to be trained to treat their customers with manners and respect. I'm thinking of leaving eSignal for that reason alone.
eSignal EFS forum support is great and livechat support for the most part is also good. But eSignal support can't do anything about their management's apparent decision to give up on trying to catch up with TradeStation's tools for US equity traders. (Please eSignal, tell me you don't know what I mean).
Journeyman, tks for the additional data vendors, however, some of the charts use esignal as a datafeed. So if esignal sucks do these vendors suck as well. Also, does anyone else here know how the performance of futuresource has been effected since it was taken over Esignal..... Bc i was going to sign up with esignal/futuresource but now i am changin my mind...
I am not supporting or complaining..simply neutral...but I have to imagine being a customer rep and what the phone calls are like... you are receiving the call for various issues...maybe you work the phones 6 hours...everytime you pick up you are expected to be "in that persons world" immediately and understand their "cumulative" experience... Costs of running these companies and their profits are unknown....the "numbers game" of how to support your product and how to guide your phone reps may be a science...that is not discussed in ET. Michael B.
As I understand it, the majority of new customers (and probably some existing customers) want access to newer or more leveraged markets. Hence to play the "numbers game" most of the eSignal features in the last year have been for options, futures, forex and foreign equity market traders. I can't blame eSignal for going where the money is. But they followed that path while still so far behind TradeStation in terms of tools for US equity traders. Now I'm wondering if they will ever go back to catch up. But certainly the phone or online support reps don't set company direction, so they don't deserve flack for lack of features. They should just know how to support the existing features, and for the most part they do.
I've used eSignal now for about 9 years and rarely (twice in the last 4 years) need technical support. I run a hot rod computer, my broadband is 4-5 meg + and my charting software (MultiCharts) plays well with eSignal. I am thinking about moving to OpenTick at some point though (as soon as they work out a few more bugs) simple because eSignal has grown stagnant in improving their services (accounting, sales, referrals and price competitiveness). I've learned over the years than when part of a company begins to fall apart or becomes arrogant . . . and it continues over a long period of time, the rest of the company is soon to follow suit. This is the reason I dumped Ensign 30 months ago after being with them for 9 years. No company will ever be perfect so one just tries to find their own level of comfort in regards to data feeds & charting software. If you are going to do this for a living you need to have a good quality product in both so you will have the confidence to trading using them. DO NOT SKIMP ON QUALITY . . . not in this environment.
The pricing of DTNIQ with one of the third party software providers seems like much better value than eSignal. I've previously stuck with eSignal because I don't want an inferior data feed but DTNIQ seems to have a better reputation than eSignal and there's definitely better and cheaper software available. Also EU customers get charged 17.5% or more VAT because eSignal has European offices but DTN doesn't.
Esignals customer service is so bad that when you send a suggestion to their ideas email, you don't even get an automated response. Imagine a technology company that can't even manage to automate a thankyou email. This to me is a true reflection of their attitude towards customers. And I'm fairly certain they don't read them anyway. Runningbear
Hmm...I got a reply from Matt a senior engineer. Whether it gets into the software is another story. FWIW, eSignal reliability has improved a lot over the past two years (except for that dreaded hanging download). I don't even bother with customer service. eSignal does what I need. The stuff it doesn't, I long ago gave up hope.
I'm going to try these guys one of these days. http://www.naq.com/rtpro/ProFeatures.stm If anybody else is using their feeds, let us know?