No sarcasm at all. Just good business practice of not trying to profit from screwing people around.
Firstly loyalty points shouldn't expire. Wrong. Totally wrong.
Your opinion.
You're stating your opinon has fact.
Various accountants, among others, would disagree with your comment that loyalty points shouldn't expire.
There are varying points of view. I accept you have one, but it's not appropriate to make a blanket statement of fact based on an opinon.
Some would say "Good business practice" is to manage your loyalty schemes to turn a profit. That's business 101.
See what I mean about opinions?
And "profiting" from "screwing people around" is vey emotive. most if not a very high percentage of punters manage such things very well without too much trouble. Are they still being "screwed around"?
Hey, if points never expired I'd be quite happy. As a pure selfish customer I totally get it and it would be great. I think I had 250 points sitting in Prioerity Club(what is now IHG) for well over 10 years because they never expired (now they do). I could have cared less about those points as they were minimal, but it was kind of nice to see them there.
It's not good business though because, as someone else noted earlier, it adds neverending liability for the provider. As a customer that's not my "problem" of course, but I also live in the real world and understand totally why they are doing it.
Who knows maybe fair trading etc will do a 3 year thing like with gift cards (in NSW, at least). I suspect 3 years would not make you happy though.
Secondly if they do expire then notify the member to avoid any issues. A simple phone call goes a long way.
QF call centre : "Hello Mr JohnK. I'm from Qantas and would like to discuss your 1.2 million points balance. We have noticed you have not had any activity in 17 months. Is everything ok? Your points are about to expire. Thanks for your time."
Not that difficult.
How realistic are you being? We've covered all this ground before.
QF boasts it has over 10million members. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 4 million of those are active enough to fly or earn points at some point, the rest are dormant accounts (It's probably closer to 7-8 mil with all the things like bamk credit cards, woolies deals and the likes, with literally millions of accounts with very minor balances, but I digress).
So let's assume 2 million. Of those 2 million, let's say in any one year 5% of those accounts become inactive and have points expire.
That's 100,000.
Further, let's assume it's an equal number over the year, as in the same every month, which seems reasonable...
So you're looking at 8,333 accounts per month.
And I am being, I think, prertty conservative with those numbers. I have no real world data to know - I could be way off - but either way I think it's safe to say it would be thousands of accounts every month.
So you want QF to call thousands of people every month, a great number of them who would not care (if they cared that much they would keep their accounts open via aforementioned bank tie ins, woolies etc).
Again this is hand holding and spoon feeding, and a very COSTLY exercise in time and resources to call all these people to say hey your points are going to expire.
QF notify people via email. Again I refer you to the original story - they clearly said they got the notification, understood it, but did not read it in time.
How is QF failing in their duty? They are notifying their customers via the usual channel of communication (email).
How is QF doing this "screwing the customer around"?
I could accept an arggument about never getting the notification or even that the notifications are not that clear (this has been noted over time, and QF have addressed this). Other airlines are far more transparent (eg I know exactly when my UA miles expire as it's shown on my account summary page).. and QF used to print this on their paper statements(remember those?
) and sure, they could be more transparent in this department..
.. but I will argue that they DO notify customers.
You're expecting them to hold people's hands with calls and reminders up the wazoo.
and guess what.. the call centres are already stretched to the max with unacceptable wait times and yet you want them to spend time calling v customers? Simple maybe in concept.. unreaalistic in practice.
It's a great idea when talking about one customer in isiolation, but in a program of over 10 million members? Just not reasonable to expect that.
