A Look Behind The Curtain of Loyalty and Rewards Programs
English: Different customer loyality cards (airlines, car rental companies, hotels etc.) Photo credit: Wikipedia
Loyalty Cards, Rewards Programs, Points Incentives, Bonus Offers and Repeat-purchase punch cards, oh how I despise thee. You’ve probably been there too. You drop your wallet and have to spend the next 10 minutes embarrassingly picking up all your various credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, etc; or, maybe you’ve been in line to pay for something and had dig through your wallet in a cold sweat (for what felt like hours to the people behind you) holding up the line, looking for that punch-card or rewards card?
Imagine if this was no longer a reality and we all had a single unified points system which could arbitrate the various rules, policies, conditions and points earnings/accumulation schemes of the various points systems. Also, imagine if you could actually put your “points” to work for you and actualyl get some decent rewards?
This is something we are working on here at BCmoney MobileTV for rewarding your web activity and participation in the community. It is a long-running experiment but we feel as though we’ll figure it out eventually!
In the meantime, it helps to know about how some of the current rewards systems work and just how they cheat you out of your hard-earned money, along with your personal information right down to where you live and what types of products you buy, thereby destroying any hopes at anonymity, privacy and true customer satisfaction.
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.