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Robinhood announced on Tuesday that it would provide “24/7” phone support to its 31 million users. It’s a long overdue move for the stock and cryptocurrency trading company founded in 2013, but signals its maturation after a difficult year that brought the company to its biggest crisis, an increase in the volume of transactions and its own entry into public markets.
Users with an account question or issue will now be able to request a call in the Robinhood app and receive a reminder sometime later from a support agent. Previously, users had been pushed towards the option of sending a message to the company and escalating the issue via an email chain, while limited phone support was offered for customer-specific business issues. at certain times of the day.
While Robinhood is certainly not the first trading company to offer phone support to its users – the company has been criticized in the past for its limited customer support options – Robinhood’s crypto chief Christine Brown notes that this is the first crypto exchange to launch phone support, and hopes the increased level of support will provide an additional level of assurance to users who are new to crypto trading.
“By being the first to offer this service, I think we are further reducing the barriers that many of our users might think of when they think of crypto trading,” Brown told TechCrunch. “I think a lot of people today think crypto exchanges are very difficult to integrate… and God forbid, you already have a problem, email support – not to mention phone support – is rare.”
The scaling of its support team to handle the phones of tens of millions of users has resulted in a wave of hiring for Robinhood. Brown says they tripled the size of the internal team and also brought in a large number of contractors to handle the phone support. Robinhood’s customer support army will be a “fairly even” division between Robinhood’s internal employees and contractors, Brown said. Users will be assigned to a particular agent based on the subject they are calling for.
The company does not make any guarantees as to how long it will take between sending a request and receiving a phone call from the company, acknowledging that certain market events can put their systems to the test, but Brown says that generally their internal goal is to call a user back within 30 minutes of the request.
The structure of this flow will likely frustrate some users who might prefer a phone number they can call, and some key types of issues will clearly fall through the cracks, including when a user is locked out of their account or has. a major problem with the application. In a launch blog post, the company details that it is working on a solution to provide telephone support to users blocked on their accounts, although this feature rollout will take place in the “coming months.”
Customer support workflows are designed to be stress tested, and Robinhood is certainly no stranger to the detrimental effects and challenges of unexpected market frenzies.
The company suffered a serious blow to its reputation earlier this year amid a surge in stock trading that forced the company to stop or severely limit trading in popular stocks like GameStop. At the time, some users thought they were seeing another example of a financial institution protecting the professional investor class, when it soon turned out that Robinhood was not financially prepared for the trading frenzy and was forced to raise emergency funds to keep pace with investors. demand. This incident highlighted some of the company’s strategic communications missteps, but also showed the limited avenues of assistance users needed to talk to company representatives and get their questions answered in a timely manner. timely.
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