RALEIGH, N.C.--The $4-billion Civic Credit Union is facing a wave of backlash and mounting frustration from former members of Local Government Federal Credit Union following completion of the merger between the two organizations on June 2.
According to a report by WNCT, Civic’s transition of more than 400,000 accounts from LGFCU has sparked dozens of complaints, many from members who say they were caught off guard by the move or experienced unauthorized charges and frozen funds. The spike in grievances has resulted in a steep drop in Civic’s Better Business Bureau (BBB) rating to D- in a matter of weeks.
“My car payment is gone, my rent is gone, there’s a whole bunch of charges that I don’t know who did it,” former LGFCU member Kathy Tyler told WNCT.
Tyler received notices in the mail from Civic about this transition for months, but she wouldn’t open them because she said she didn’t have an account with Civic and thought it was spam. Until one day, she saw a card in one of the envelopes, WNCT said.
“It was like welcoming me to my new bank, then next thing you know, I’m contacting the bank because my card didn’t want to act right. Come to find out, charges were being taken out of my account that I didn’t authorize,” Tyler told WNCT.
Similar complaints (about 30) to Tyler’s began popping up frequently on the Better Business Bureau’s website, WNCT said. The BBB calculates a business rating off the number of complaints and the amount of time it takes for those to be resolved.
While Civic officials have stated that the merger has been a success “for the most part,” the customer service strain tells a different story. Delays in resolving account problems have further damaged member trust and contributed to the negative BBB rating.
With more than 400,000 transitioned accounts and a backlog of issues, Civic now faces the dual challenge of fixing technical problems and restoring confidence among its expanded membership base.
“The vast majority of our members are flourishing, and they are having a good experience, but every single member matters, and the members that have had the complaints and the frustrations and the things like that, are critically important,” Civic Credit Union CEO Dwayne Naylor told WNCT. “That’s all we are thinking about, I have a team dedicated to making sure that we are solving all those problems.”