I was not a fan of this exec and posted why above.I think that line of discussion resulted from someone posting a complaint about "divisive branding campaigns" without explaining it. Someone else speculated that they meant the ship, but nobody actually knows what it meant.Apparently talking about 3 fund portfolios and roth conversions is beaten to death, so now shipPersonally I don't care if they changed the ship to something else, but I do care about poor website support or performance and/or higher ERs.
Hoping that the new CEO is customer focused.
logos are the next big thing to discuss online.
My conclusion: sometimes complaints are posted for no discernible reason. Maybe better to ignore those.
Getting back to the topic, I'd add "reducing incidents of incompetent customer service" to the priorities of interest.
That said, rapid growth is very hard to staff and train quickly enough.
The sheer number of new accounts, and accounts with retirees who like to call and speak to a person, would really strain any organization.
They had no choice but to go on a hiring spree, and given anyone hired will not have Vanguard specific experience, there was no way the service would be fine for a period of time. If he did a good job, we'll never know until after he's gone, and possibly credit the new CEO unfairly. Depends how long it takes to right the "ship". In the next year I wouldn't credit the new guy with much of anything, good or bad. But 5 years from now it will be really hard to blame nor give credit to the outgoing CEO. Making large changes takes a much longer time in a firm of this size and complexity, which is often why execs make short term decisions that hurt all in the long run. We'll see the legacy over the next 1-2 years, after that the new CEO hopefully will make their imprint.
I don't see this as a Vanguard specific issue but rather a high growth problem. Look at job openings for Fidelity customer service and branch reps. They often hire kids out of college and others with no industry experience at all and certainly wont know Fidelity systems and procedures for a while. Luck of the draw who you get when you call either firm. But rapid growth requires long term solutions in automation. People perceive short term solution is hiring, but those hires rarely are truly a short term solution as people had hoped. The more Bogleheads move to Schwab and Fidelity the more complaints we have seen about those firms. Fidelity had multiple system outages last year, and we get some reports of problematic anecdotal customer service from both firms. My anecdotal experience has been mostly positive with Vanguard. Slow but usually a good end result. That does not mean this CEO couldn't have done better. They could do much better in tech and this guy was their former head of tech, what a crime. IMO he never should have been in charge of tech nor CEO. I think with Fidelity having the original family still running the place, and having employees moved to regional lower cost locations (retaining experienced staff) helps a lot, but the rapid growth still seemed a challenge. Vanguard massive hiring and locating them all over the place, away from their HQ, makes for a much slower progress in training. Their IT is bureaucratic and slow to make useful improvements, and THESE decisions were from the outgoing CEO. Glad to see him go.
Statistics: Posted by beyou — Thu Mar 14, 2024 11:23 am — Replies 315 — Views 28975