Dubious Contests Awards vs. Who’s Number One?

If you look at a number of stock transfer agents’ websites or advertising material, you will find a blurb about how they won this “stock transfer” award, or came in first in that survey of stock transfer agents’ clients, or “placed” in the top five of some other beauty contest. And some of you might wonder why you don’t see something like that on our site. Well, there are several reasons.

First, the way that most of these “impartial” surveys work is that you have to pay a “consulting fee” to the survey takers, or the prize sponsors to be in the “survey” or to be in contention for the “award”. Now think about it; how impartial or comprehensive can such a contest be, if the only transfer agents who are “entered” are the ones who are willing to buy their way in? Obviously, that leaves out a lot of other agents who refuse to participate in that kind of nonsense. And if you look at the dates of some of these contests and awards, you will see that they are from several years ago, because even those transfer agents have decided to stop participating in these charades.

Second, (that was a long “first” wasn’t it?) the rankings are often preordained by the way the various surveys are conducted. For instance, the larger agents can just submit the names of the clients they know will give them a great reference, ignoring the clients they have messed up, and the smaller agents often only submit one or two clients who, for all you know, they may be related to. I mean, what does it prove if one client ranks you at the top of every category? And of course, you are not told by the transfer agent when they post their “Award” how many clients actually responded!

So, what about StockTrans? Well, we think the best way to rank an agent is by the loyalty of their clients. StockTrans is still proud to say we have never lost a client due to service dissatisfaction! We have lost clients who have been bought, gone out of business, or who, because of financial difficulties, have been willing to give up service for a lowball provider (although these often come back to us when they are in better financial shape). We even once lost a client that thought we weren’t “big” enough to handle them, much to their subsequent dismay when they found out “bigger” does not mean the same as “better”. Can you think of a better measure of service than the fact that our clients are unshakably loyal to StockTrans? Many of our clients have been with us for every day of their “public” lives, going back decades!
Ok, and for those of you who are dying to know, yes, a few years back we did enter one of those surveys; only we submitted all of our clients’ names. And the result was that of all the small to medium- sized transfer agents (who received more than just one or two hand-picked clients’ responses) we were, of course, number one.