Vanguard seems to have gone a bit too far with cost-cutting in the customer services department. One of my most frustrating recent experiences was dealing with Vanguard's website and customer service. There were all kinds of issues, some minor annoyances, others serious time sinks.

Here's an excerpt from a long and boring story:

... One day, I couldn't log in to their website. Attempting to go through "forgot my password" had me fill out a long form with security question. I filled it out, pressed submit, and was presented with the same form, but blank. No error message, nothing else. I thought their website must be broken that day, tried again the next day with the same result. After doing this a few times, I called them. Turns out, my account got into some invalid state. It took them more than a week after that to figure out what was wrong with the account and fix it.

Then, my account fixed, I tired to buy some eft-s. Website replies: "Cannot perform this transaction, call us for assistance". I think that's a temporary outage, try again the next day. I called them again, waited a while to get an agent, found out they needed some more documents from me. I sent them in, but there was no way to find out if they were happy with the documents on their website ...