If you belong to the exclusive club that is being a Costco member, you already know that for the last 17 years if you wanted to use a credit card you’ll be using an American Express. Costco even had their own credit card that would double as your membership card. But with their contract coming to an end, Amex and Costco just couldn’t come to agreeable renewal terms. Which means that Costco had to take their business elsewhere. Citigroup which owns Visa was more than happy to supply a comparable credit card.
Other than occasional complaints about it’s boring/ugly looks the card itself offers some of the best benefits of any credit card with no annual fee. All that would have been great if customers didn’t have so much trouble getting one or even using one. Despite the deadline of Costco Amex credit card not working coming up, thousands of customers have complained about not getting their new Visa card. Thousands more people have said that even while having their new card, they can’t activate it or even access their accounts online.
Since Visa has started shipping out the new cards their call centers have been overwhelmed with complaints from people not being able to use their cards. Over 1.5 million complaint calls have been recorded for the Costco Visa alone. There is now a separate message apologizing for very long wait times for Costco Visa customer support. There are also lots of questions hanging in the air that aren’t explicitly addressed in the short letter Costco sent out to all about the credit card switch. Many people take full advantage of Costco and their myriad of benefits including insurance, rentals, travel protection, wallet protection, and purchase protection just to name a few. There are questions on whether the new card will offer the same level of protection and what will happen to their existing protection.
For all the hiccups that customers have to endure, Citigroup still deserves a lot of praise.“Citi completed one of the single largest portfolio conversions in history,” Ms. Bombardier said. That means millions of new Visa accounts inherited from Amex in an extremely short time. Though the argument remains that Costco and Visa could have handled the conversion much better. The last major transition when it came to a retail card came from Walmart. They made the switch from Discover to Mastercard in 2014. Their conversion was done in phases instead of all at once. In addition, instead of relying on a universal deadline, customers were able to keep using their old cards until the activation of the new one was complete.
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