Hilarious, humiliating admission by Bilt Rewards
/I woke up this morning and, compulsively reaching for my phone, saw a tweet so embarrassing I had to read it 3 times to make sure I understood it correctly. Twitter user @playalaguna asked Richard Kerr, the Senior Director of Travel at Bilt Rewards, a perfectly sensible question: “Why is BILT rounding dollar amounts down on points, $2.99 crediting as $2. Most cards round up, at least when it is $.50 and above...”
Now, you may find this user’s tone a bit more aggressive than absolutely necessary, and you may find quibbling over a maximum of 3 Bilt Rewards points (since the co-branded credit card earns 3 points per dollar spent on dining) to be a bit extreme, but the quibble is a perfectly reasonable one, especially since as playalaguna mentions, virtually all rewards credit cards solve the problem by “erring” on the customer’s side.
Now consider the possible responses you could make as a high-profile figure in the travel hacking community and brand ambassador for your company. A few obvious options:
Neutral: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We’ll reach out to our credit card partner and make sure points are awarded correctly going forward.”
Apologetic: “Sorry about that! A lot goes into launching a brand new rewards program and credit card partnership, and we overlooked that. That’s why your feedback is so important to us.”
Legal/Technical: “For privacy reasons our current relationship with Wells Fargo only allows us to see whole dollar amounts for transactions so we are only able to award points in whole dollar increments. We’re working to change that and we hope you’ll be patient as we resolve this issue.”
What did Richard Kerr say? “Economics for a startup worked on whole dollar spent. Now that we’re a year in, we’re looking at making all these rules and idiosyncrasies as rewarding as possible. Send me a DM and I’m happy to award you the point.”
This is an astonishing admission. Kerr is saying that not only was this “rounding down” a known issue, it was not a bug, but a feature of the program! Bilt Rewards deliberately short-changed its credit card users in order to award them as few points as possible, in order to keep people from reaching redemption thresholds as long as possible, in order to spend as little money as possible, in order to stretch their startup funding as long as possible.
To call this “customer-unfriendly” would be a gross understatement. It’s downright customer-hostile: the customer is the enemy at the gates, trying to get as much value as possible from our program, and our corresponding duty is to give them as little value as possible.
But more than that, it flies in the face of everything we know about how loyalty programs succeed. Rewards programs attract customers when they offer frequent positive reinforcement, even when the actual value of the rewards is negligible. A few weeks back I received my REI “dividend,” a coupon that can only be redeemed at REI, so I’m going to buy my new bike helmet at REI instead of on Amazon or at a local bike shop. A $15 quick endorphin hit is going to net REI a $45 sale, plus whatever else I pick up while I’m in the store.
Bilt took the opposite tack: overpromise, then underdeliver, or even better from their perspective, don’t deliver at all.
