Complaint Review: Macy's CCSMC Spectrum/CBSD CITIBank USA/CCSM - San Antonio, Texas, 78245 Texas

This is a very serious problem that was all around bad on Macy's part. What happened is Macy's took accounts that were open but inactive for at least 24 months and sent them offers to change their account to a Citi Mastercard. But there were two BIG problems with this... 1) They made no attempt whatsoever to verify that the addresses on file were still correct. 2) This offer gave you a limited amount of time to call in and DECLINE the card or the change would be made. So now they are sending out offers to addresses which may have changed in 2 years, and if no one declines it the card will be sent out to that address. Not very bright is it? Talk about a case of credit card fraud waiting to happen. Then to top it off, Macy's did not even adaquetly inform their own employees! At that time I was working a 1pm-9pm shift. About 1:25pm I received a call about this Citi Mastercard. Well I had heard nothing about this issue so I simply told the caller she was contacting the wrong people. 10-20 minutes letter another call about a Mastercard? Again, you got the wrong people. About this time my old trainer comes over and says we have a training class for the Citi Mastercard program starting at 3pm. Well gee, that does alot of good for the two previous callers I turned away. My training class was the first one scheduled for the Mastercard program...at 3pm almost a full week after the promotion letters were mailed out. In all the time it took to plan and print this offer, no one thought to inform the people who would be fielding these calls until after the customers were getting them in the mail. Brillant planning right? But wait, it gets better! Turns out some of the customers who had these inactive cards were going to the stores trying to open new accounts during the timeframe between when the offers were mailed and the macy's accounts closed. Makes sense since alot of these accounts were left over from stores Macy's had bought out and many had incorrect addresses. So instead of opening new accounts, Macy's re-activated these old accounts. But wait, havent we already sent out the promotions and given them a deadline to respond before we close those accounts? Re-activating those accounts doesn't constitute declining the Mastercard offer. Alright, so now we've re-activated some of those accounts, let customers charge on them and generated new cards. As time goes by these customers realize they haven't got their cards or statements, so they call us. We pull up the account and guess what we find? The deadline has passed, the accounts are now closed. This customer has no idea about the Mastercard offer so we are forced to explain it to them. So now we are taking the brunt of the customers anger for management's screw up. Another problem....remember those incorrect addresses? Well now since the accounts are closed are turned over to Citi we can't make any changes, computers won't allow it. But Dr. Mr & Mrs. Management people, how do you propose we correct the addresses and send them their statements so we can be paid for the items they charged? We haven't figured that out yet? Talk about "oops." It took almost a month before they finally got their act together and updated the system so we could correct addresses on those accounts. This whole situation was by far, the worst case of terrible planning I have ever seen or heard about in the corporate world. Not to mention the millions of customers credit and financial status their jeopardized with this "promotion." I'd love to see Macy's really called out on the carpet for this one. They deserve it.