(retail rants) loyalty programs

[mister c]

Oh, God, loyalty programmes suck.

I feel sorry for customers who can’t say no to these and get signed up
for every single loyalty programme ever. I’ve seen people come in with
literally a handbag loaded with these useless little cards which are a
complete waste of money and have more costs associated than benefits
for the stores actually forced to use them.

There’s always bugs in the system used to implement them, and the
system at the last bookstore I was at was run by a Javascript website
which was so filled with bugs from the 1990s that half the time it
took about five minutes to load each subsequent page, and the other
half of the time it wouldn’t work at all. But it looked nice, and to
marketing monkeys, that’s all that mattered. Functionality is, after
all, a marketing crime.

Don’t tell that to a marketing monkey, though. Loyalty programmes keep
them happy for hours as they try to figure out more ways to annoy our
regular customers. With things like spam, and smses.

A video store I worked with started sending robot smses to everyone on
our loyalty programme, and within three days I had to delete over 60
people from the programme list who rang or came in to complain. Of
course, it was all my fault, and they acted as though I’d spent the
morning smsing them all. And that’s what really annoys me even more
about these incentives the marketing monkeys come up with – I’m the
one who has to deal with all the complaints, the abuse, and the
scowls. I always wish I could just pass them all onto the marketing
monkey department, but they keep changing their phone numbers and
emails.

Following this crazy event, my marketing monkeys came up with a
surefire way to wing back those customers they’d managed to annoy.
They wanted me to ring them all up and personally apologise for their
inconvenience and to offer them free stuff if they’d rejoin.

After three phone calls, and three howling banshees, I simply gave
that idea up for dead.

Loyalty programmes all suck.