Diners Shifts Customers To Universal Card Center

<B> Diners Shifts Customers To Universal Card Center</B>

By Lynn Woods

Citibank Diners Club recently announced the closing of its customer service center in Denver. As part of its restructuring of its businesses, all of Diners Club's customer-service functions, including servicing of corporate accounts, will be consolidated at the AT&T Universal Card customer service center in Jacksonville, Fla.

The shift to the Jacksonville center, which won the esteemed Malcom Baldrige quality award in 1992, will be phased in over a 12-month period, with the Denver center scheduled to be closed by the end of the second quarter of 1999. Walter Sanders, vice president of communications at Diners Club, said the card issuer notified all its corporate customers of the change in the beginning of August.

Because the Denver service area is located in a 20-year-old facility that is not owned by Citibank, the move to consolidate with AT&T Universal Card's customer service center, which is only eight years old and was acquired by Citibank last spring, upon its purchase of the Universal Card business, makes economic sense, he said.

"The technological level of the wiring inside the Jacksonville building is more efficient than that in the Denver facility," he said. "This will enable us to sustain better customer service--for example, by allowing agents to more quickly access their computers to get information for a customer."

David Hillman, a consultant at Deloitte & Touche, said he was surprised Citibank, which bought Diners Club in 1981, hadn't consolidated the Diners Club customer service department sooner. "It makes a lot of sense from a cost perspective, and also because Jacksonville is an excellent facility," he said. "This should be a positive move for Citibank."

However, Sanders admitted that the transition process is not without its bumps in the road. Noting that Diners Club prides itself on its high service standards--in its efforts to have each call answered by a representative within 15 seconds, the company has earned a 98 percent rating in achievement of that goal--Sanders said that a higher-than-anticipated volume of calls and unforeseen levels of attrition as a result of the announcement was causing some delays. "The actual wait for a caller is now closer to 80 seconds," he said.

Furthermore, although Diners Club prides itself on being "an ear to ear" company, Sanders noted that some requests, such as balance statements and date of last payment, had been automated.

Although Sanders couldn't say how many of the 800 Denver employees were planning to leave rather than transfer to Jacksonville, he said it was significant. "We perhaps underestimated the attractiveness of the Denver job market."

To compensate for the loss of staff, Diners Club has instituted five-week training programs, of which there will be two per month--each with 20 trainees--throughout the transition process. In addition, "We're doing extensive cross training of current employees to help out during the peak call times," he said. As long as it is receiving calls, the Denver center also is being backed up by a Citibank-owned center located in Nevada.

Nonetheless, Jerry Verhasselt, corporate travel manager for Los Angeles-based Bechtel, which has 9,000 Diners Club cardholders in the U.S., said he was concerned about the loss of long-time Diners Club personnel at the Denver center. "They had very little turnover," he said. "They'll be lucky to get 10 percent of the people from Denver to move to Jacksonville."

Verhasselt, who said he was very pleased with the staff and service his company had received from Diners Club over the years, has visited the Denver center a number of times. He said his office was in touch with Diners Club customer service reps half a dozen times a day, be it regarding delinquencies, new cards, lost cards or the dozen other issues that routinely arise in the management of thousands of cardholders.

Despite the current difficulties, Sanders reiterated his belief that service would become even better once the transition is complete. "The level of commitment to service won't waiver. Ultimately, our customer service level will exceed 98 percent." And although the customer service center in Jacksonville does not include a corporate sector for the Universal Card--servicing is limited to cardholders--that setup would have no bearing on the Diners Club operation, said Sanders, who added that he expected the number of Diners Club service staff to be the same.

Other functions at the Denver center, such as accounts payable and collections, also will be migrating to other locations. Citibank spokesperson Maria Mendler said other recent Citibank consolidations were student loans, which was relocated from Rochester, N.Y., to Sioux City, N.D., and credit-card collections, which just moved from Richardson, Tex., to facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Kentucky. "We're consolidating functions where it makes sense to avoid redundancies," she said.

With a 1997 corporate charge card volume of approximately $9 million, Citibank Diners Club is the third largest corporate T&E card provider in the United States.