Dec 29, 2007 10:55 PM
12677 Views
In the earlier days of online broking, I had tremendous respect for this outfit. Along came competitors and started providing better features than sharekhan. As the years passed, sharekhan has lost its dominance due to lack of availability of features, lack of content management skills, depleting quality of support, and degrading usability of the website.
Lack of availability of features:
a. Sharekhan website doesn't function well on firefox. Their trading login often gives errors at the login page, if accessed via firefox. On lodging a complaint, their tech team comes back saying firefox is not a standard we have.
Got damn it! Firefox is a universal standard for secured browsing. Being a financial services website, sharekhan's reply is despisable and shows their lack of interest in customer's security. IE is the most vulnerable browser. How can they reply to this saying that their website is usable only in IE? Are you doing business or charity, SSKI?
b. Another instance was while I tried for withdrawal of money for several days in a row and their system kept on giving an incomprehensible error code (CIS system not available) to an end-user. They took about a couple of weeks to resolve it.
Lack of content management skills:
A large chunk of their research database is not updated well. They still have research reports from 2002, 2001, etc upfront. These are articles that can be easily archived and removed from front links - esp the matter they used to categorise as ugly duckling , evergreen, etc.
Depleting quality of customer support:
When you contact their customer support, email responses come in late. Not only are they late, but they are fairly useless as they ask you to email them again with your customer id etc. This is such a third rate customer desk service. An easier way would be to provide a webpage asking for relevant information and people could log in their help request from there.
Lack of usability considerations:
*The design team hasn't provided any usability considerations to this website.
First, it is slow to load.
Second, it loads up with 2 popups.
As soon as the main page comes up, there are two intrusive pop-ups. I can understand that sharekhan wants to make money from ads. However, they can use non-intrusive ads such as google ads and have $ revenues.
I bet even if they search for free material on google's product
management (there are scores of videos and articles about the same) and
follow it, they will be able to crank out a much better product!
I bet all these issues are emanating due to lack of skill sets that they can hire in a cost effective way. Of course, this is a big problem in India and will remain so for a long time to come. However, they are losing business because of this -so, isn't it time for them to get their act together?
The Indian scene for online broking business is getting competitive. Sharekhan will have to shape up or ship out. Sharekhan is way behind than being called the true king of the financial jungle. For now, it's just a pussycat!
