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February 21, 2012

Online Brokerage Customer Satisfaction Falls



There was a time when online brokerages were the new “it” activity that the Internet allowed us the ability to complete. No longer were we at the whim of large brokerage houses taking our money in order to provide a service we could provide to ourselves.

Of course, there are some negatives of using an online brokerage as well and it seems that those negatives are starting to outweigh the positives as 2012 gets underway.

In 2011, customer satisfaction of online brokerages sagged quite a bit and an annual study that was released Tuesday morning shows that customers believe there isn't much to separate the four big companies in the field. The study polled more than 1,200 people who use online brokerages and asked them to state their level of satisfaction with online brokerages from 1 to 100. While overall satisfaction did dip a little bit – approximately 2.6 percent to a score of 76 -- there is still a large swath of people who are perfectly happy using these kinds of services.

What that means is that while online brokerages are probably not sweating about overall satisfaction, that number is one they will have to watch. A large part of the problem is that customers who use these websites generally allow how the market is doing to affect how they feel about their broker.

Claes Fornell, the founder of ACSI, laid out why brokerages will have to take notice despite the small dip in satisfaction. "Despite efforts by brokerages to improve their websites for making and recording transactions, market performance plays a large role in determining investor satisfaction."

The lack of any real difference between major online firms bears watching as well. Charles Schwab, eTrade and Fidelity finished as the companies who have the highest satisfaction ratings with 79. TD Ameritrade finished just behind those companies with a 78 rating. When talking about companies outside the top four (the “all others”) category, those companies received a 75 customer rating.




Edited by Tammy Wolf
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