Around a month back, ICICIDirect started sending me messages on my cell phone regarding its IPO tips. And not once, but in duplicate or triplicate. Now, I really don’t depend on ICICIdirect for my IPO tips, and in fact, I don’t invest in IPO’s. But I do have an account in ICICIDirect for investing in the secondary market. And given that this is related to money, I have given my cell number to them so that in any emergency, I can be contacted. Big mistake.
No doubt, somebody in their marketing department would have a brainwave about helping their customers by sending them free IPO information. Or it could be that since other brokerages provide such information, they felt competitive pressure.
Anyhow, I had not requested any such service, and it gets fairly irritating to receive 5 such SMS in a day (and if you are travelling, you would be charged with the roaming charges for receiving such SMS as well). So off I went to the ICICIdirect customer site to reverse this; and wonders, they did not have a section where SMS message sending could be discontinued. Now, I did not want to remove my cell number from there, but wanted to see how I could cover this. So, after some more poking around the site, it was clear that I could not file a request from there.
So I wrote a letter to helpdesk@icicidirect.com to get my request implemented. A couple of days later, I received a reply where they suggested that it would be helpful for me to keep this service on since it was a free service, but since I had made a request, they would do it. Okay, this is not so bad, maybe they are good on customer service after all inspite of all that I had heard.
And this was fine, I did not get another SMS, and I was happy. Then, day before, it started again. I have got another SMS of an IPO, and it is crazy. How can they do this ? Don’t they care about what their customer wants? The problem is, there are not too many good services such as ICICIDirect that give a seamless link between trading, demat and savings account, making it a perfect computer service (even though they have very high brokerages).
Now I guess I will have to file another email with customer service to get this repaired, but I am certainly not happy over this. It sounds petty, after all what are a few SMS for giving an information service; but giving it after the customer has declined it is bad, and given that international roaming could make this SMS expensive, it can be pretty bad after all. Customer complaint page for ICICIDirect