Hey Chivers, starting Sunday night, we had an issue with iCHIVE points disappearing. This system is handled by a 3rd party loyalty company – a group we love working with btw. But people make mistakes, and that’s ok! Also, for those of you who don’t know, you have to make at least 1 purchase with your points every 6 months or you will lose them. That doesn’t mean you have to spend all your points by any means, just a few to let us know you’re alive.
We have to have a system in place to track ‘inactive’ users. Reserving inactive points for lapsed users would be an accounting nightmare. For example, if a user has 5,000 points and never claims them, we would have to house the correlative cost in actual inventory forever. That would accumulate and even couple hundred inactive users could theoretically collapse the system. So if you have points, use them, it’s free money!
Anyway, to the specifics of what went down we received the following email from our vendor:
We’ve finished reverting the expiration, so all affected customers now have their points restored. Over the next few hours we’ll also remove the “Adjustment” transaction from their history too.
I’ll get back to you in the next 24hr to arrange the next steps, primarily:
– sending the email notification if 6 month redeemable points are about to expire
– follow-up expiration a few weeks later
I recall last time the email sent out without your template, so it was turned off and — I apologize for this — not turned back on, which resulted in the expiration happening without warning.
I’d also like to apologize for my slow response on this – I missed your email yesterday!
I totally understand the frustration but to think we’d just wholesale delete everybody’s points is a bit far-fetched. Here at theCHIVE, we’re not a corporation and we treat our users with respect this loyalty program is our attempt to go above and beyond to reward you, our way of saying thanks. So it would be pointless to rip out the feature overnight. All points as well as your overall score should be restored in the next few hours.
KCCO,
John
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