Icicidirect.com website was down for a substantial part of Thursday and Friday. Simple you could not trade.

Suppose you had an open position in a particular share and wanted to square it off, or you wanted to take a fresh position, you could not.

If you had an open position and your house computer was down could and you could not have squared it off….I hate to think how Icici would have treated you.

Icici Direct is perhaps the MOST expensive brokerage firm in the country, and surely the most profitable business. The high cost but poor service is not a fair thing at all…

The worse thing is the media not even mentioning it in their front pages…Look at the subdued Hindu Business Line news coverage. Frankly the media LOVES government bashing – imagine ALL THE ATMs of SBI not working one day…and all newspapers would have SCREAMED..really the Media…no these words I do not wish to use them….

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2010/07/09/stories/2010070954571000.htm

  1. ICICI-fiefdom and unconnected way esp for the DEMAT services, followed closely by HDFC in expense yet better services

  2. The site is even down now (9/7/2010 11pm IST). The messages its displaying is:
    Dear Customer,

    Site will be available from 10:00(IST) on July 10,2010. We regret any inconvenience cauesd.

    Customer Service
    ICICIdirect.com

  3. I scoured the newspapers on Thursday trying to find some mention of it in ET or IndiaTimes. Didn’t check the Hindu. Was amazed at how they managed to cloak that. So much for independent media. The only decent mention I found was on moneylife and some forums. What really gets my goat as a web-scalability/performance guy is they not provisioning a BCP (Business Continuity Plan). Given that setting up a FinServ BCP is not rocket-science, I’m inclined to think they don’t consider their user-experience worth the expense. “Oh s**t, site is down – fire the engineers because we didn’t listen to their pleas for implementing redundancy and tell our media friends to look the other way.”

  4. Faheem,

    i liked ‘what gets my goat’ – a rare usage in the era of sms :). Icici direct was getting away to some people saying ‘some servers are down’..or stuff like that. My questions are

    1. if it had happened to the end customer at his end and ICICI DIRECT had made a loss – how would they have reacted? (since all transactions are normally pre-funded, they will get it from the client anyway)

    2. why such a subdued response from the ‘independent’ press?

    both questions stun me. Moneycontrol, cnbc, utvi, bloomberg, ET Now,

    …are u guys listening? what about the print media? Sad, but true.

  5. even if its working, many a times it run slow comparatively, and more weird, clicking on some sections shows “This section will be available in next 5 mins”.. lol

    same with their ATMs, in my area, the bank has 3 ATMs and I never see them all working together whereas a corp bank ATM nearby never disappoint.

    – Jagbir

  6. It is an open secret – anything that has got to do with ICICI is lousy! Bad customer service every where – banks, cards division and web services /trading services too. Just show how powerful they are – since they are always winning customer service awards – almost every day!

  7. My father is retired and now doing some social work in Grahak Panchayat. They receive lots of complaints everyday from the common people in the banking area. Out of those complaints many of them are about ICICI bank.

  8. any service from ICICI…let it be home loan, personal loan, credit card charges(oh..no)…or anything else the only thing I can do is pray for its customers.

    I can’t dare to recall my experiences with this bank….
    and so called customer-friendly attitude.

  9. subra,

    Yesterday, I wrote something about customers complaint about ICICI at Grahak Panchayat where my father does a social work. Today, its strange to see that the particular comment got deleted.

    Amol

  10. subra,

    My apologies for the latest comment where I said that the comment got deleted. I overlook it.

    Once again, sorry

    Amol

  11. Site is again down since yesterday. Two continuous days of downtime on 26-7-2010 and 27-7-2010.

    I wonder what kind of technical staff this company has hired. Not only are the customers suffering but the company has also lost 2 day’s worth of revenue that they could have earned as brokerage.

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