Say you email the tech dept of your broker at 9:30 am EST, it is a question that'll take say 3 minutes to respond to. When should you receive a response? A whole day has gone buy and I haven't received a response and call me crazy, but I think this is entirely too long. What your opinion?
strange things can happen to email, both to and from your broker. It's nice to be able to call your broker and get live support on the phone. I don't know if your broker offers that.
Most aim to respond within a day. There are variables such as the amount of support staff available, who's capable of servicing the issue, and whether they care about retaining you as a customer. A few years ago, I sent a request every two weeks or so via one broker's web-page-based request form asking if I could get my PDT restriction lifted, but got no response for a couple months. I suspect that since I only had a few thousand dollars in the account, they didn't feel like it was worth devoting any effort to this. When I phoned them, I got an immediate response, and in retrospect I should have done that at the beginning.