Since Paytm is soon coming up with their own borking services, How many of you intend to move away from Zerodha now?
Reasons for considering moving away from Zerodha :
Unlike most people I came to Zerodha for better tools and technology rather than cheaper services, but I still can’t reliably use zerodha’s technology at times, for most part its good but services going down at random times is still pretty common. I only tried BO order with Zerodha once in my life and it executed orders on wrong side and I never again touched it, even the customer support was pathetic. With Paytm coming up we can hope at least on technology front they will be equally good, customer support might be similar even paytm doesn’t have too great of customer support
Customer Support is absolutely no where close to good, I read one of the interviews from @nithin that they make a large part(60-70%) of their profits by adding new customers specifically first time customers. I raised a few queries on their customer support a couple of times and never got a response until after multiple reminders or until involved @nithin in conversation. In my recent encounter they closed my ticket by just writing an automated sort of response without actually resolving my issue, I then forwarded an email to @nithin after that I got a response on my ticket which still didn’t resolve my issue and I had to do multiple follow ups just to get a answer. I remember having a similar situation couple of years back when I forwarded an issue to @nithin and I heard back from him on email and immediately got a call from staff and got my issue resolved. Clearly a very different customer experience over the years which either shows work load or arrogance Zerodha has developed after becoming No. ! broker in terms of customer count. This is the customer experience for me after having an account worth 6 lakhs with Zerodha.
I am currently debating if I should my Mutual Fund holdings to Zerodha, Having an option to invest in direct mutual funds was a distinct advantage but Paytm is already doing that and other brokers are coming up with that fast.
I moved away from ICICI Direct to Zerodha since ICICI DIrect seems to have no interest in upgrading their technology and Zerodha has far better offerings at that time, also tried HDFC securities on the way but even they didn’t match up, for some time Zeordha had a monopoly sort of since on one was offering better technology at a cheaper(most important factor) price, but if Paytm comes up with better Technology at competitive pricing I don’t see a reason to stick with Zerodha since they won’t be offering anything special and doesn’t appreciate (this is my opinion) their existing customer base.
Its still early since we don’t know Paytm’s offerings yet but whats your opinion, Would you move away from Zerodha if Paytm offers similar or better services, How has been your experience with Zerodha?
Competition is always good, keep everyone on their toes, everyone is constantly pushed to update products, better pricing for the end user, etc. If Paytm offers a better product, of course eventually all clients will move away from us, but that is what will push to make sure we are improving on ours. Products take time to evolve, we have the advantage of our product having spent over 4 years (in house product) and having seen a lot more market cycles and edge cases.
Bracket order is a complex order type, it is best to avoid if you don’t understand all the nuances. It is a huge challenge to keep the customer support up at such a scale and in a very low cost business model. Normal days everything happens well, usually the drop in experience is when there is an issue that affects a larger number of people. But we have been doing things to improve this, we should get better over time on this as well.
If I were to move away from Zerodha, it’d be for two reasons-
a) the random “technical issues” which come up from time to time, when no trade goes through. I’ve been at the receiving end of that before but fortunately, the loss was negligible that time. Though to their credit, there were no apparent issues during the exit-poll & result days recently.
b) can’t trade OTM Bank Nifty options. And just noticed yesterday that you can’t trade far OTM Nifty options now too.
For now, Zerodha meets my requirements but eagerly waiting to see what Paytm delivers.
@MilindSrivastava, I guess the point about these random technical glitches is not if they have affected a large number of people, Its more about confidence about the product/company, Can we actually go in and make a trade or it will just fail due to some technical reason? From @nithin’s comment it seems like they are not bothered about that and that’s what I meant by a sense of arrogance. Focus on customer retention is what I feel Zerodha lacks very much right now, I bet even ICICI DIrect and HDFC Securities must have felt the same way when Zerodha entered, i.e. we have been in this business with our products for a very long time
By the way what Nifty options you are not able to trade? How far out, Can you give an example?
strange that you feel I am being arrogant. The only way to retain a customer is by improving on the product, and that is what we are focused all the time.
@nithin I don’t think you are getting what I am trying to say. Let me try and explain this again, please consider this as feedback from a customer,
Sense of arrogance, It is not meant for you but I used it as an expression that Zerodha representative’s are not treating existing customers with enough respect or value. I gave some examples too, this makes it feel like that Zerodha doesn’t feel the need to solve or deal with customer problem to a satisfactory resolution rather just trying to kill the number of tickets, and that’s just one situation, I have felt the same way while interacting with Zerodha representatives on various forums like this one, Kite developer Forums, Zerodha Support and others.
If you are only focused about building new products and customer don’t get enough value out of that, I don’t think those products are useful, for instance if a console dashboard shows some data which is wrong most of the times because its only updated at a certain time during day which is not mentioned anywhere and support team just close the ticket stating you should look at your contract notes for better understanding that’s both bad customer support as well as arrogant in my opinion.
So my point is, building new products will attract new customers for sure but if the features you are building are not adding any value to customer and there is no one to answer queries then there is no point of such features. As you said its possible customer might not understand the features very well but if Zerodha keep telling people to not use feature they don’t understand it or keep closing tickets without proper resolution, I don’t think the tech advantage will last for long.
I trade through Pi, and with Zerodha I have a certain trust level that makes me okay to click the button in the first few seconds to few minutes of the open.
The reason for this trust, comes from my experiences from brokers such as SAS online and upstox. They are not made for the open. They freeze at the open. Literally!
So, does this excite me that paytm is coming up? Well, I never gave a thought.
Why?
Trading is already that hard. I am only focus on smooth executions as per my playbook. Zerodha serves pretty good for that purpose. So, will a new broker give me more growth. Nah, I ll pass for now.
I’ve been with Zerodha for more than 5 years. Now, it would be a lie to say that I have never had any complaint against them or I was never angry with their service. There have been times (more than I care to remember) when the thought of changing broker did occur to me, but when I looked at the alternatives available, I didn’t feel very sure about leaving Zerodha.
I do have issues with Zerodha. I would be happier if they didn’t restrict Option Buying, if their software did not have much of downtime. I really haven’t checked the statistics of their downtime vs competition, but traders like me are, more often than not, emotional fools. So the memory of a downtime becomes hard to forget. Being a trader, is in itself, highly stressful. Added to that the stress of the software, doesn’t make for good digestion. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t want to change from Zerodha anytime soon.
Also I would be more happy, if you could add phone help to your algo trading thing. For traders like me (LKG fail in software ) it makes lot of difference.
All this will depend a lot on the brokerage charges (if any) by paytm on f&o and intraday equity.
At Zerodha, it seems that most active traders are paying for subsidizing the investors.
And on top of that, they face,
OI limits on index options
friction in pledging and depledging
forced usage of kite (due to issues in current software versions) when they prefer pi or NOW
loss of interest income on cash ledger balance
inability to trade the f&o banned stocks for intraday
non-availability of futures rollover contracts on kite
have to pay additional margin even if the f&o has an ofsetting position for contracts in physical delivery (eq: long cash short future)
@option.trader
One thing is clear. You are a newbie. And you are trying hard to be profitable which you have not yet achieved. keep it up. Best of luck. Happy trading.
One of the best thing Zerodha deliver for the retail User is Simplicity of user interface(Kite Web), which you won’t get anywhere. Apart from that they are the ones who really tried to educated retail people with actual step by step knowledge through their initiative ‘Varsity’ which is a very great product for the beginner and a tight slap to Trainers who charged lakhs yet provide nothing usefull.
Except few downtime due to new technological upgradation during trading hours( Which happens and can happen with anyone providing technological service, because even google can’t ensure 100% Uptime for their website!) and limitattion of Option strike price in Nifty and Bank Nifty everything in zerodha is good. Though I read somewhere that zerodha is doing something like tacking another broking licence to counter that 15% oi limit in Option, though only @nithin & @siva-reddy can verify that fact!
But I do agree with you that the support team are always in a hurry to closed Ticket! But they never seem to be arrogant at least in my experience.
And to answere your original question whether to move from zerodha to upcoming paytm, I feel keeping in mind Zerodha’s transparency about the charges and user interface simplicty, one should not.
@Sankha, Thank you, your response make sense. For a beginner or investor with small account things like knowledge about trading, easy to use interface, cheap options and lower charges matters a lot, these are primary reason people are with Zerodha and that has been the reason from the very beginning. But for someone who is putting up large capital with them priorities are exact opposite, in my case I would prefer Peace of Mind while trading, reliable systems, customer support when I need it. I do like nice clean user interface with lot of helpful information.
Well nobody can’t guarantee 100% Uptime for their service specially when it depends on so many things! & related to technilogy, but if you are getting that from somewhere then good for you, You should choose that, but Paytm is yet to prove that which time will tell. And till then if you are sticking to zerodha then I would suggest you to install Nest softwere for zerodha for order excaution, because even when kite was down few times recently, Nest was working absolutly fine, according to few fellow trader who are using it!
strange that you feel I am being arrogant. The only way to retain a customer is by improving on the product, and that is what we are focused all the time.