The ease of trading has turned it into a cultural phenomenon and a Silicon Valley darling, with the start-up climbing to an $8.3 billion valuation. Millions of young Americans have begun investing in recent years through Robinhood, which was founded in 2013 with a sales pitch of no trading fees or account minimums. “When he is doing his trading, he won’t want to eat,” said his wife, Tashika Dobatse, with whom he has three children. His account value shot above $1 million this year - but almost all of that recently disappeared. Dobatse took out two $30,000 home equity loans so he could buy and sell more speculative stocks and options, hoping to pay off his debts. After funding his account with $15,000 in credit card advances, he began spending more time on the app.Īs he repeatedly lost money, Mr. Dobatse, now 32, said he had been charmed by Robinhood’s one-click trading, easy access to complex investment products, and features like falling confetti and emoji-filled phone notifications that made it feel like a game. But his behavior changed in 2017 when he signed up for Robinhood, a trading app that made buying and selling stocks simple and seemingly free. In a launch blog post, the company details they’re working on a solution to bring phone support for users locked out of their accounts, though that features rollout will be sometime in “the coming months.Richard Dobatse, a Navy medic in San Diego, dabbled infrequently in stock trading. 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 having a major issue with the app. The company isn’t advertising any guarantees for the amount of time between sending a request and receiving a phone call from the company, acknowledging that certain market events may stress test their systems, but Brown says that generally their internal target is to call back a user within 30 minutes of making a request. Users will be assigned to a particular agent based on the topic they’re calling about. Robinhood’s customer support army will be a “fairly even” split between internal Robinhood employees and contractors, Brown says. Brown says they have tripled the size of the internal team and have also tapped a large number of contractors to handle phone support. Scaling its support team to handle the phones for tens of millions of users has meant a hiring spree for Robinhood. “I think a lot of people today think that the crypto exchanges are very hard to onboard onto… and god forbid, you ever have an issue, email support - let alone phone support - is scarce.” “By being the first to offer this service, I think we’re further reducing the barriers that a lot of our users might think of when they think of crypto trading,” Brown tells TechCrunch. While Robinhood is certainly not the first trading firm to offer phone support for its users - the company has been criticized in the past for its limited customer support options - Robinhood crypto lead Christine Brown notes that it is the first crypto exchange to launch phone support, and hopes that the increased level of support will provide an added level of assurance for users plunging into crypto trading for the first time. Previously users had been pushed toward the option of messaging the company and escalating the issue through an email chain, while limited phone support had been offered for specific customer trading issues at certain hours of the day. Users with a question or account issue will now be able to request a call inside the Robinhood app and receive a call back some time later from a support agent. It’s a long-overdue move for the stock and crypto trading company founded in 2013, but one that signals its maturation following a challenging year that brought the company its biggest crisis, a surge in trading volume and its own entry to public markets. Robinhood announced Tuesday that it will be bringing “24/7” phone support to its 31 million users.
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