BMO Bank of Montreal, Meridian Credit Union and Qtrade Investor Named Top Customer Service Firms in Canada

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jan. 23, 2014) - BMO Bank of Montreal provides the best customer service amongst Canadian banking firms while Meridian Credit Union provides the best service amongst Canadian credit unions, according to a yearlong mystery shopping program conducted by research and business analysis firm Surviscor. Qtrade Investor provides the best service in the highly competitive Canadian discount brokerage industry.

The Customer Email Responsiveness (CER) program, now in its 8^th year, analyzed over 175 'mystery shopper' emails, per firm, sent between January 1^st, 2013 and December 31^st, 2013 to over forty leading Canadian financial services firms. Surviscor establishes a CER Rating for each firm as well as tracks every detail of correspondence with the firms. Details include the time to respond, the performance of the stated response guidelines through auto-responses, the full email dialogue and the validity of the answer provided.

"The industry results both indicate and validate that email responsiveness is not a lost method of communication," said Glenn LaCoste, President of Surviscor. "Firms are trying to push both current and potential customers to social media channels to supposedly provide better service; however, the best firms are servicing customers where the customer wants to be serviced and should be praised for their efforts," added LaCoste. Surviscor also introduced a pilot social media campaign in 2013, recognizing the need to review the customer service levels in the growing social media industry.

The CER results indicate that the brokerage industry responds, on average, in half the time of a banking firm; however, the brokerage industry's top five firms respond on average in less than three regular hours while banking's top five respond in four hours. The key result is that the best brokerage firms typically respond in less than one hour during business hours. Complete rankings can be found at www.surviscor.com.

For further information regarding the results, general and firm-specific reports, the ongoing CER program and gaining online access to the detailed data via scorView, contact Surviscor at results@surviscor.com or Glenn LaCoste at glacoste@surviscor.com.

About Surviscor Inc.

Surviscor Inc. is a Canadian leader in the research, business analysis and ranking of Canadian online services offered to retail consumers. Surviscor produces seasonal feature and functionality audits, including its prominent Online Brokerage, Online Banking and Mobile Banking scorCards. All studies and analyses serve as industry benchmarks for consumers and industry participants by identifying online and mobile offerings considered to be leading-edge as compared to the industry standard.