A large financial company has announced its plan to cut Florida customer service jobs.

American Express recently revealed it would cut 7,000 jobs, some of them located in south Florida. However, Joanna Lambert, vice president of corporate and financial communications, said in an article by the South Florida Business Journal that Florida is not a major focus of the job cuts.

Overall, the company plans to cut about 10 percent of its global workforce as part of a reorganization. South Florida is home to two American Express call centers in Weston and Fort Lauderdale. “There will be some employees whose jobs have been impacted in Florida but we are not sharing specific numbers by location,” Lambert said in the article. “However, Florida was not the main focus for the restructuring – the reductions are across the different business units and markets worldwide. The primary focus is on non-customer-facing jobs and management positions so that there will be no interruption in ongoing customer service and support.”

The cuts are expected to save the company $1.8 billion next year. The restructuring plan includes reducing staff and payroll expenses, cutting operating costs and reducing investment spending, including:

• Taking a restructuring charge of about $370 to $440 million pre-tax (approximately $240 to $290 million after-tax) in the fourth quarter. The charge is primarily associated with severance and other costs related to layoffs.
• Suspending management-level salary increases for 2009 and instituting a hiring freeze for open positions. The total benefit from these staffing and compensation-related decisions is expected to be about $700 million in 2009.
• Cutting expenses for consulting and other professional services, travel and entertainment and general overhead, saving about $125 million next year.
• Scaling back investment spending on technology, marketing and business development and streamlining costs associated with some rewards programs, for about $1 billion in 2009.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Jobs, Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.