One of the most important things a service can do is keep an ear to the proverbial rails for customer feedback. You cannot expect your customers to come right up to your site and give it too you. Many of them have blogs of their own and will simply just write a review of the site. In many cases, those reviews are permanent online reminders of how your site is doing. Which makes a poor review even more hazardous.
TDavid, a person whose opinion I respect, is
giving Zecco a go for the first time. I'd say that overall, he's at least marginally happy with the service, but I think he's got some great tips for things that need a little fixing.
They ask for what seemed like an unusually large amount of confidential information to setup a trade account.
I'm sure there is a reason why they need some of the information they are asking for. We're all familiar with the industry standard info that is needed. But do they really need to ask things like "net worth"? I agree with TDavid here. Sounds a lot like profiling for advertising.
The initial account setup experience for Zecco has been slower than I
remember setting up other online accounts. My account should be ready
sometime this week so I can start trading.
I work at a financial institution, so I am very familiar with how long it takes to get an electronic transfer. 2-3 days. Why are
Zecco users being asked to put up with week long waits for setting up an account? Is there some magic wizard behind a curtain ala Wizard of Oz that must approve them first? Is Zecco doing background checks first? This delay needs to be streamlined and eliminated if Zecco really wants to be popular. Free trades are great, but they'll only get them so far. Eventually, there will be other services offering free trades and then it will be the customer experience that makes or breaks the site. And right now, it wouldn't take much for a new competitor to have a better customer experience.