Best: Fidelity

LET'S

face it. These days every major fund company provides the same kind of basic services. The online revolution has automated everything from investment plans that let you funnel $50 every month from your bank account to your favorite growth fund to phone lines that let you check account balances at any hour of the day.

So what separates Fidelity, the winner in this category, from the rest of the pack? For one thing, the firm keeps its phone lines staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That s a great service for the time-strapped, do-it-yourself investor who plans all week to call up to ask some questions about new educational IRAs, but then doesn t get around to the task until Sunday evening. And people do take advantage of Fidelity s round-the-clock service.

Although call volume at Fidelity drops off dramatically on the weekends, its reps still receive more than 1,250 calls each day between midnight and 6 a.m. And they get a total of about 42,500 calls each weekend. (Neuberger & Berman and Strong are the only other firms in our survey that staff their phone lines with real people 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)

Fidelity s other strength is the 79 walk-in service centers it has sprinkled around the country, where reps can do business face to face in languages such as Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese; take your pick). The only company that comes close to matching Fidelity in this area is Dreyfus, with 26 walk-in centers.

To rate the firms in this category, we looked for 16 key features, including automated phone services that let you trade fund shares at the push of a button. But in the end, we also gave a little extra weight to the fund companies that staff their customer-service lines around the clock.

Say you want to reinvest your stock-fund dividends into a money-market account or designate a new beneficiary. A live rep can make those adjustments on the spot. That s a big plus for many investors, and an area where the no-load firms in our survey have a sizable edge: Their reps are available an average of 14 hours per day -- 5.4 hours more than those at the typical load family.

As we mentioned earlier, at load fund companies it s ultimately the job of the broker to answer his or her client s questions. Still, it s nice to be able to get information about your holdings once everyone has packed up and gone home for the day. That may explain why 17 out of the 18 firms in our survey offer automated phone-service lines. The lone exception: Putnam, which bottomed out in the category this year and last. Putnam does provide automated phone service for its retirement-account clients, according to Tom Despres, a Putnam managing director who oversees operations at the firm s customer-service site in Andover, Mass. But, he adds, the firm s retail customers overwhelmingly say they d rather deal with a live rep.