Hi all I am meeting with a reporter from one of the financial periodicals and one of the prepared questions is related to customer support. I would appreciate the forums view. Instead of being vague I'm going to concentrate on my experiences with Interactive brokers support. I have spent a few moment to put my thoughts together 1 "AI" chatbot the "AI" chatbot is a joke. I am very proficient in prompt engineering and find the IB chatbot to be functionally useless. 2 Chat To get into a chat with a representative can take up to 30 minutes. Then, whilst in the chat session, the responses are delayed. We type a response and 5 minutes goes by before a reply. Then the reply shows no understanding of the original question nor the reply I just gave. 3 Phone support when I dial support I am on hold a consistant 20-50 minutes. When someone comes on the call they lack experience in rudimentary things. On the latest call I asked if the support person had any understanding of what a trailing limit order was and I could hear them typing before responding with a reading of some boiler plate documentation. Would the forum consider these experiences to be representative of theirs? this doesn't merit a poll. I like to be fair in these things. Thank you
this is a shame. I had great success with the phone support when I called them before. Normally it was the Chicago help desk populated by ex traders. Now it's ridiculous. I'm going to demonstrate it to the reporter.
Their support is good. In their defense... can you imagine how many beginner level programming questions they get? Teaching their customers how to code isn't their job but they do it anyway.
my questions are not beginner level. I am capable of coding in multiple languages to the TWS api ( python, c++. julia) I have never asked them a coding question but I do see what you mean. thank you for your observation.
Congrats, but I wasn't commenting about your questions... I was defending them. You may experience an occasional hold time but, e.g. at least you talk to a human. Did you ever try to call Google about a bug in Android? Did you ever call MSFT about a problem with Windoze? Perhaps you're just impatient? So, I've generally found their support to be timely, helpful, courteous, and complete. Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. You're welcome.
I don't share your experiences. Re read my observations and you'll see that I don't exhibit impatience unless it is warranted. I have requested that the reporter ask some of her colleagues to spend time trying to get an answer from IB support using AI, chat, voice support and log the results. I think it's about time that their periodical put together a considered review of Interactive brokers as it stands today vs historical ( 1 year ago) specifically targeting support. In answer to your questions I have never had to call either MSFT or GOOG for support as their chatbot systems work well. Secondly their forums are exceptional and helpful on many different levels. An example would be the fine people who populate the various android replacement os's.
My experience with them(and I've been a customer for many years) is your question better not be time sensitive because it might take a few days to get the right answer. The first person you get in a chat or email probably wont be very knowledgeable but if you're persistent, keep nagging and pestering them they will kick it up to a higher level and more knowledgeable person who will have the right answer.