Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Helpdesk at Icici Direct

My other half has a trading a/c with the ICICI Direct but it is only me who runs it and knows the portfolio's worth :-). Lately, I have observed a lot of descripancies in the online MF portfolio tracker at their site. It is reporting few fund holdings twice. This inflates our net worth but, it is of no use as I can not sell them. For selling I need to use the unit holdings page and sadly, the data is accurate here.

I reported this matter to ICICIDirect through following email:
Ref: Trading a/c # XXX
Demat a/c # XXX

Hi,

My mutual fund portfolio tracker page ( trading -> portfolio -> mutual funds) is showing wrong data. Some funds are getting reported twice causing wrong portfolio value. Some funds like:

SBI FUNDS MANAGEMENT PVT LTD SBI MAGNUM COMMA FUND - GROWTH OPTION
and
TATA MUTUAL FUND TATA INFRASTRUCTURE FUND - GROWTH


are reported twice on the page each time under different Fund "Category". I have noticed this problem ever since you have implemented new SIP investment options. Looks like your coders have done a shoddy job and QA has failed to notice it.

This is causing a great inconvenience to me by reporting inflated portfolio value. Pls check and correct the bug as early as possible.

Thanks,
xxx
After two days this is the reply I received from their CSA:
Dear Ms. Jha,

We wish you a Happy New Year!

If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:
1. Login to www.icicidirect.com
2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page
3. click on the Mutual Funds link
4. Click on the Scheme name of the Mutual Fund which you wish to delete.
5. Click on the "x" symbol available on the extreme right side to delete that particular transaction.

Sincerely,

XXX
Customer Service Officer
ICICI Bank Limited
Note the signing authority and her designation..."ICICI Bank".

This is my follow-up reply and I am waiting to hear on this :
> If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we
> request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:
>
> 1. Login to www.icicidirect.com
> 2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page


Did you understand the issue I have reported? I think it is a totally irrelevant and dumb reply I got from ICICI Direct. Let me try to explain the problem once again.

Say I have a mutual fund called MF1 and I have 100 units of MF1 in my DEMAT account. The portfolio tracker page reports MF1 twice as:

serial# 1 MF1 - units held =100
serial# 2 MF1 - units held = 100

Since, I am NOT adding any transaction MANUALLY into my mutual fund portfolio tracker, it must be coming through the software that ICICI Direct uses. Right!

Another thing is that I have subscribed for SIP, hence MF1 can have 100s of SIP transactions all accumulated under SL#1 and SL#2. Do you expect me to delete each SIP transactions one-by-one through your portfolio tracker? Can you imagine the time it will take to do that?

Another thing, if I delete MF1 at SL#2 what is the guarantee that SL#1 would not get deleted also and I will loose all my portfolio information!!! I suspect both SL #1 and SL #2 to share the same PK in the back end database if your DB is in third normal form (?)

I appreciate that you may not follow all the issues that I have raised here, hence, please escalate it to your Technical Architect or SQA Lead- I am sure he will understand the problem and please do not waste my time (and yours too) by copy-pasting a "set" response from your
repository of replies!

Please...my time is very precious...

Thanks for taking time to reply.

- xxx
It is getting increasingly difficult to get an accurate response from ICICI Direct for any query... but ... what are my options? I have heard more annoying tales about the competition from my friends. Unfortunately most CSA activities are either out- sourced or are manned by less than adequately trained personnel who are quite incompetent to address such queries :-( and what is alarming is such dorky CSAs are polluting the name of ICICI Bank as well by signing under their banner. I think ICICI management should separate the CSA's of ICICI Bank and ICICI Direct- at least that will help them to preserve some respect in ICICI Bank that I want to have!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I fully agree with you, ICICIDirect CSAs have not been of much help, it appears they are only "Masters" of Copy-Paste...........ICI should do something so that they give a human response and not a stupid copy-paste reply

Bimalesh Jha said...

Just wanted to comment that I am seeing improvement in ICICI Direct customer service nowadays and Firefox support is better in their website now.

Firoz Khan said...

Online finance consultant-Online financial planning India, Financial Advisory Services & Financial Planning Process. Our Certified Financial Planners are qualified and experienced to manage your money, pure and unbiased advice, no retail outlet