OT: WTF?

I have a Fidelity 401k that I never moved from an old job. I just checked, and right above the USERNAME field is a link titled NEED HELP. You can reset your user name and/or password there.

Is that function not working for you?

My guess would be the cutbacks started pre-pandemic. I work for a large financial institute and we have been scaling back our call centers for a couple of years now. Between online access and automated phone capabilities there isn't much of a need for a live representative to be available 24/7 anymore. Did you try the forgot login link on Fidelity's website, you can usually unlock your account that way without talking to anyone.

We have reduced our US based call centers staffing levels by almost 30% and our foreign call center staffing by more than 50% in the past 3-4 years. While we haven't accelerated our downsizing due to Covid we have shut down all of our US based call centers and moved all of those associates to work from home. The only job losses were non-customer related positions like security and maintenance staff and our cafeteria staff. We have also given our Canadian and European call center associates the option to move to work from home if they want to. We are keeping our South American and India based call centers in office for now due to infrastructure reliability issues we experienced this spring when we temporarily had to close those facilities due to government orders.

Oddly enough Fidelity is a family owned business. Being in that industry what I have found since the pandemic is that the call centers are routing to peoples living room. I deal with Schwab , Fidelity, BNY, and TD Ameritrade all daily. All of them have call centers working from home. So maybe that has cut back on the 24 hour service

Whodey and Daddillac - are either of your companies doing much with chatbots?

My 401K is also from an old job - I log into it at least once or twice per week and have been doing so consistently and all of a sudden I get a "pin blocked" message tonight - it's not telling it's the wrong password but telling me it's blocked - I've had that account since 2000 and I've never had an issue trying to call during non-business-hours - having to log-in tonight is not super-important, I'm actually more concerned that I'm being blocked and IDK why - it's a long holiday weekend so part of me is assuming they may perhaps be doing an IT-upgrade to the system and why I'm having issues - I'm not that surprised I can't log-in, I was more surprised I couldn't get anyone on the phone and this has never been an issue in 20-years.

I don't want to ruin your weekend, but having read what you wrote, I just checked my account and had no problem logging it.

It's also an older account from a job in the 90's.

@winex, yes we are using chatbots to handle basic customer service related issues. Our IT department has been upgrading them on a regular basis to allow them to do more and more. They are still a little clunky but are getting better, in a few years they will probably make 80-90% of our customer service reps obsolete. They are even starting to have them handle some early stage collections accounts but that still has a long way to go before it will replace our collections agents. Computers are great at answering questions but not so great at negotiation and convincing people to pay their debt.

Thanks Whodey.

You might be surprised by some things that are right around the corner. Have you heard of GPT 3?

A lot of those automated customer service systems are a PITA; they often make you go thru a maze of automated options b/f finally connecting you with a live representative - I can how companies might like them since they are able to unload workers doing that function; but as of now many don't seem that good beyond just doing some basic stuff and as a custy I end up being pissed off and feeling strung-along vs feeling like I'm being helped.

The times they are a changing Papi.

Lots of banks are locking accounts if they go more than one quarter without a login.

I just checked. I logged in ok using a password.i even saw a link for forgot password if needed

@winex, haven't heard of it. Since I don't work in the IT department I only have a cursory knowledge of where we stand with the development of chatbots , but with the AI advancements I have seen I have no doubt that they can take over most jobs in the near future. I just hope it takes long enough for me to retire before they take over my job.

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords. https://youtu.be/Skfw282fJak

Ive notice much poorer customer service if any several companies since pandemic started

I was sure that your YouTube link was going to be to Kent Brockman welcoming our new insect overlords. But Jeopardy is still good.

GPT 3 is a language model from OpenAI that is just leaving beta. It will be available to the public next month. It is a generative text model that has quite a bit of semantic knowledge about the real world.

The predecessor - GPT 2 - is not as sophisticated, but still pretty impressive. If you want to play with it to see what it can write on it's own, check out this link:

https://app.inferkit.com/demo

It’s so much easier to manage your old 401ks by rolling them all into a single IRA. I’ve been telling a family member this for a decade. No success.

I don't use chatbots.... I could use them through my custodians if my clients went directly there but for the most part my clients contact my office. I do not even have a phone tree, I pay a live person to answer the phone and direct the call. Given my average client though I don't want a phone tree or chat bot advising or directing them. I make enough to hire that out.

If I was doing more transactional work then I would leverage the hell out of technology. I manage 6 smaller 401k's 100-150 employees, those are all technology based. If any of the participants has a real question they get us live though

Everything is being pushed to doing this online for your service needs, because revenues are being compressed in the record keeping industry like fidelity. Since these firms are getting less revenue, they need to streamline their customer service to hire less customer service
People. Then what customer service
People you do get to reach, they’re so burnt out and underpaid it’s like getting little service at all. I’m sure Papi that something changes with your email or phone #, or even your address so they will need to confirm your personal identifying information for you to continue online access. Good luck and tell us what it was.

@heaving- Very likely can't roll over 401k while still employed by company. Once you leave the employ of company, rolling over 401k into an IRA is 1 of several options.

@Daddillac - thanks for sharing.

Those hours are pretty normal. They're a financial institution and pretty much keep to business hours. That's been my experience with the few companies that I've used and that includes Fidelity.

Hopefully Papi was able to get his Fidelity issues sorted out. It’s scary when you get odd messages trying to access your account - as I wonder if it got hacked.

I think many financial companies closed because markets were closed yesterday.

I was unable to log in all weekend - I could've just asked for a new password via the "Forgot My Log In" website feature, but I wanted to know why my log-in was being blocked - the website was not telling me it was an incorrect password, but that it was blocked.

I was busy today and couldn't contact them till late in the day - their current hours are up to 8:30 pm Eastern; I called in around 7:30pm and for the first time in calling them the auto-system told me there was about a 15-minute wait - at least they have a call-back feature where you can hang-up and they call you back when it's your turn in the queue - I got a call-back about 25-minutes later: I kinda wonder what may be going on that they had such a heavy call volume - I know it was a holiday weekend but in the past I always got thru right away even late at night (for simple things like having trouble logging in).

Anyway the girl on the ph just walked me thru the steps of resetting my password, which I could have done via the website on my own - I went ahead and did that but told her my reason for calling is to know why my account had been blocked (in case someone other than me had tried to log in) - she said the only thing she could see was that on Saturday the account had been locked after someone had tried to log in 3 times and failed - I did try to log in on Saturday and I did try to log in multiple times but from the get-go/first-time, I got the "pin locked" message - i.e. me trying to log in 3 times IMO was not the source of the problem b/c it was locked from the first time I tried to log in - I log into that account at least 2x/wk and know the password by heart and never have an issue logging in so I doubt it was something I did b/c again I got the "pin locked" message from the very first attempt - I asked the girl on the ph if she had the timestamp of the failed log-in attempts on Saturday and she said she couldn't find that info (I more or less knew when I hadn't tried logging in on Saturday) - she said other than a 3x failed log-in attempt on Saturday, she didn't see anything else that would explain the pin being locked although when I called tonight and got thru at first via the automated system, when I said "log in problems" to the auto-system, the auto-system responded the pin had been locked due to a pin-lock request from a previous call (which obviously wasn't me) - I let the girl on the ph know about the auto-system message but she said she couldn't find anything on the account indicating a call to block the pin - so it's basically a mystery as to how that pin was blocked - the girl on the ph said there had not been any transactions on the account and I looked and confirmed that was the case - anyway I ended up having to get a new password to get access to the account and I also went ahead and changed the user-name in case it somehow may have gotten compromised and someone was trying to log-in w/ my compromised user-name.