USAA has definitely gone downhill in the 25 plus years that I've been with them. They are getting tons of complaints if you look on the internet...even I was surprised and thought I was the only one. We're all starting to talk at work as many of the people that I work with are also military veterans. We're all noticing the same thing. Their service has gone downhill significantly, and their costs to members have gone up precipitously. Instead of an organization that is showing support and working with military members, they now seem to be gouging us and using up goodwill. They understand that military people tend to be loyal, and they are taking advantage of this. They think they can just shove rate increases down our throats and we'll all say "Yes sir, can I have some more." No more for me. The sad thing is that they keep asking me to invest with them to manage my assets. No way. I refinanced with them relatively recently, and it was a total mess of outsourced people not talking with each other, lost documents, emails that aren't responded to, and always something that I needed to do "immediately" to keep everything on track. Very, very disorganized and chaotic because USAA no longer emphasizes quality over quantity, or substance over square filling. I detect that USAA has outsourced vendors, hired a number of substandard "clock punchers", and generally shove you off with the next available ### to help you out...that's after navigating a frustrating phone tree. My insurance premiums also went way up, but I will begin looking for alternative companies to do business with for just about everything now...it's got me very angry. At one time they were a very special company that catered to an outstanding group of low risk and generally very responsible members of the military...now they're consciously re-branding their business as the Walmart of the insurance industry...leverage and gouge the good risk profiles of the people that built USAA to subsidize and expand their business for a bunch of "yay-who's" simply to build market share. Sad. They used to be a Costco, now they're a Walmart...and the people that I speak with daily no longer respect them as an institution that offers military members anything beyond the run of the mill. Side note: The USAA insurance agent I spoke with today with was very good...rock solid, and helped to mitigate the increase in my homeowner's insurance premium to "only" 600 dollars instead of the 1100 they tried to pull earlier. But case in point...why should I have to drill down deep into an organization to get any decent service...they should be doing this on their own. We shouldn't have to "keep on top of 'em" just to continue to get good value. I finally got somewhere with the premiums, but I don't have time to be a customer watchdog just to keep them from robbing me blind.
