We’re getting ready to publish the latest e-Monitor Report and this one is about email support. Specifically, the report looks at the availability, usefulness and responses from publicly available non-client emails. We examined the 20 brokerage firms tracked by e-Monitor and looked for publicly available prospect email tools or links. The initial thought was that all firms would surely provide something as simple as an email link - after all, it IS the new millennium! Turns out there is a little more variation than you’d think.

For starters, only 15 out of the 20 firms provide a simple link or a web-based email form. We expected full-service brokerage firm sites to tend toward providing links to reach advisors and limit general prospective client help. While we were correct in that assumption we were surprised to find that three out of the five “hybrid” or bankerage firms did not offer even a simple general help email link. These aren’t the little guys either, these are big players in the field with generally above average websites.

In general there were two methods firms used to offer email assistance - a web-based form or an email link. Web-based forms were further separated with in-page forms or pop-up forms. Our preference for these (in order) would be pop-up form, in-page and finally email link. The email link is the bare-bones option of the bunch and forces visitors to depend on their computer’s email program or forces them to copy and paste the email address into a service like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Still, remember that at least five out of 20 firms didn’t even offer this.

Once we narrowed down the field and started sending out emails we learned pretty quickly that response times are not all equal; in fact, response times varied from minutes to hours. In one case, a very well known discount brokerage never replied to our repeated emails at all. This was especially notable because they provided such a well thought-out online form.

Scottrade, TD Ameritrade and TradeKing were the best performers as far as timing of responses – all three firms replied to each of our emails with 30 minutes. TradeKing had the fastest response time to our first email (three minutes), and Scottrade had the fastest response time to our second email (five minutes).

This is the second time we covered this topic and in the four years that have passed we’ve not seen much movement in the fastest response times but can say the slowest times have improved. Four years ago it took the slowest firm two days to reply, that’s since been whittled down to one day. Two of the previous report’s fastest responders once again turn in a strong performance. Scottrade and TD Ameritrade (then Ameritrade) continue to provide the fastest response times four years later. The firms had response times of six minutes and two minutes, respectively. Scottrade and TD are currently in the top three. The firm with the fastest current response time (TradeKing) was not in our coverage lineup four years ago.

If you’re a subscriber to e-Monitor you’ll have access to the full report in just a few days; if you’d like to know more about the report I’ll be happy to answer any questions.