You have made yourselves heard, at least to Your Survival Guy. Vanguard’s service isn’t what it once was. Now, Vanguard’s new CEO, former BlackRock exec, Salim Ramji, is being told the same thing. Will he listen? Don’t get your hopes up. Jack Pitcher reports in The Wall Street Journal:
Vanguard won an army of loyal customers by cutting fees to the bone and promoting simple index-tracking investing. Now many of those fans are fed up.
New Chief Executive Salim Ramji will be the first outsider to take the helm of the beloved fund manager on Monday, and many clients are hoping he will finally fix a longstanding source of frustration: the customer service.
Social media, review websites and online forum Reddit are frequently flooded with Vanguard brokerage customers complaining about issues spanning glitchy trades, incorrect balance information and hard-to-reach customer representatives.
Theodore Wagenaar, a 75-year-old retired college professor in Sarasota, Fla., suffered through years of such problems before deciding to move all of his accounts to Fidelity this year.
The final straw came after he was locked out of his account for days.
“It was difficult for me to leave them. My heart is with Vanguard and their mission,” said Wagenaar, who had been a customer for 40 years. “But it just continually got worse. The service is abysmal.”
Vanguard ranked last out of eight major brokerages for customer satisfaction with website performance and mobile apps in a recent survey of 2,700 investors conducted by Investor’s Business Daily, which is published by The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones. The asset manager has acknowledged the problems, which some analysts chalk up to an underinvestment in technology.
Action Line: Your Survival Guy has warned about the problems with Vanguard, and you can download my recently released SPECIAL REPORT: The Trouble with BlackRo… er… ummm, Vanguard today.
