BMO Mutual Funds is the 2011 winner of winner of the mutual fund service award by financial services strategy and operations research firm DALBAR, Inc.
This marks the sixth consecutive year BMO Mutual Funds has won the award, which recognizes exceptional customer service.
Honours also go to Franklin Templeton Investments, RBC Global Asset Management, and National Bank Securities Advisory Service for placing in the first quartile in DALBAR’s year end rankings.
In a tough year full of challenges, DALBAR says these award-winning firms maintained a degree of consistency in the level of client engagement, with representatives moving away from basic question and answer exchanges with clients to more in-depth discussions.
DALBAR continues to observe an ever-increasing focus on gathering assets, although agents across the industry struggled at times with delivering product and service information.
“Congratulations go out to the team at the BMO Investment Centre and those at BMO who are responsible for ensuring that their clients are being well-served. They have demonstrated time and again that their business model places superior customer service on a very high pedestal,” says Michelle Slute, director client relations & communications at DALBAR in Toronto. “Their clients have been in very good hands for a long time, showing that they have not lost sight of the importance of placing the customer first,” she added.
The mutual fund service award is based on systematic testing of customer service throughout the year. Driven by client preference measurements, DALBAR conducts thousands of rigorous tests each year evaluating a company’s quality of performance in product and procedural knowledge, professionalism, ease of doing business and their ability to deepen relationships with clients. Companies that exceed a variety of industry benchmarks after one year of testing earn the DALBAR mutual fund service award.