Best: Scudder

Worst: Invesco

OTHER RATINGS

Range of Services Online Services Account Statements Investing Information Back to Main Story

YES, IT SEEMS,

the most basic questions can often be the hardest to answer. When asked for the benchmark of Oppenheimer Discovery, one Oppenheimer rep told us she wasn t familiar with the term --

was there perhaps another word to describe what we were looking for?

When we later asked if Discovery invested in IPOs, we were greeted with a few seconds of dead silence, and then: "What s an IPO?"

Our goal in this category was simple -- to find reps who not only knew their stuff, but truly tried to be helpful. Of course, being speedy, courteous and patient didn t hurt either. Armed with a list of more than 20 questions, our testers made 10 phone calls to each firm in our survey at different times of the day during June and early July, asking about specific stock portfolios.

No matter how tough our queries got, though, Scudder s reps came up with the answers. Curious about the benchmark for the Scudder Small Company Value fund? The firm s phone staffers not only can tell you the right one (it s the Russell 2000), but can give you its year-to-date return in a flash. Need to know the turnover rate of Scudder Large Company Growth? That s a piece of cake for Kathy, who not only had turnover data, but also called us back within six hours with data to compare the current top sector holdings with those of December 1997.

At Putnam (which lost the category outright last year), the story was quite different. Only six reps out of 10 could provide load-adjusted returns, and just two out of 10 could provide the corresponding benchmark s return since the fund s inception. In addition, our testers spent an average of two minutes on hold as Putnam reps scrambled to answer our queries. (Rival AIM, whose reps performed the best of the load groups in this category, kept us on hold for just 25 seconds on average, the shortest of any firm in our survey.) In fact, the only thing Putnam had going for it this year was that newcomer Invesco s reps were worse.

Our conversation with Invesco s Cecilia was mostly a series of pauses as she scrambled to find Small Company Growth s total return and benchmark. In fact, only three out of 10 Invesco reps could name appropriate benchmarks for specified funds.

Laura Parsons, an Invesco spokeswoman, acknowledges that they "have to raise the bar," and says the firm will be revising its training program to make sure its reps can handle tougher questions. Putnam stands by the quality of its reps and says it typically puts customers on hold only when they request additional information.

You d think that when a rep didn t know the answers, he or she would have transferred us over to someone who could help. But unfortunately, those cases were few and far between. One such exception: a Janus rep named Brian, who quickly admitted that, as this was his third day on the job, he wasn t able to answer our stumpers on the firm s Special Situations fund. And begging our pardon, he promptly handed us over to a representative who could.