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Loyalty - Issues Managing

I just set up the loyalty program and while setup is pretty easy, managing and marketing this program is very cumbersome.  I'm trying to figure out if these are glitches or I'm just not doing it correctly.

 

1.  I want to send out the canned email that was prompted when I first created the loyalty program but I can't seem to get back to it.  When I did have it drafted it was dynamically pulling in directions and specifics of the program but it was all blank in the email.  Is this a known bug?  How do I get back to that email template?

 

2.  It says I've had 96 customers register for the program, but when I go to the Customers section and filter by Rewards Participants, there are only 15 customers listed.  What gives?

 

3.  Is there a separate charge for the Marketing package on top of the Loyalty charge?

 

This seems way more difficult than it should be at this point.  Help!

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Hey @sagganis, I feel your frustration with some of there, but I think I can help. 

 

1. Hmm, when I started my Loyalty program I didn’t see a canned email like this, but it sounds like it could be a good feature! I just created my own email with some details and info of how it works and sent it out as a newsletter. Do you remember anything more about when you saw it and what it looked like?

 

2. When you filter your customers by Loyalty Participants I believe that it shows you only people who have entered in their name and email address on their status page - those are your reachable Loyalty customers. If you scroll through your full customer list and see folks with just a phone number for a name, those are other Loyalty customers that aren’t reachable by email. 

 

3. Yes there is a separate charge from Loyalty and marketing. The Loyalty makes the Loyalty program work, and the marketing lets you send out as many emails as you’d like at a reduced rate, depending on how many customers you have. 

 

Overall, the Loyalty and marketing systems have been working really well for my ice cream shop. There are definitely still some kinks to work out, but overall it has tremendously simplified and improved our business. 

 

Hope ths helps,

Pesso 

Pesso - he/him
Pesso's Ices & Ice Cream
Square Super Seller - I'm here to help!

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Super Seller Alumni

Right back at ya sir!

The amount of help and good vibes you've spread in this community is unparalleled! Way to rock!

Pesso - he/him
Pesso's Ices & Ice Cream
Square Super Seller - I'm here to help!
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@pessosices There was no attack. I simply pointed out facts that conflicted with your cheerleading for Square. It’s unreasonable to expect no response to your posts that went beyond Square software functionality, included your product development life cycle knowledge, and that everyone at Square was doing the best that they could.

 

You are again answering as if you have factual data on my Square account. Is that accurate? Are you being given information on my account?

 

To be a member of the Loyalty program requires a phone number and not an email address. You are mixing Reachable with Loyalty participant - 2 different categories. BTW, I have an email from the product manager (Helen) stating the email link to the Loyalty program should have been eliminated years ago. Oh, and Reachable sort includes ~80% of customers that haven’t provided their email address.

 

It’s time to stop cheerleading and to start providing non-biased feedback and expectations that will make the product worth its price.

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I think the issue here is that if you are paying for a service, than it should work.  If Sqaure wants to trial a service and work out the bugs, than perhaps offer it for free until it meets a certain performance standard and than charge.  

 

If you make people pay for a service and then they discover it does not work, the customer has now invested time, money and customer loyalty into a faulty program.  It is not fair to the Square Customer or the customer.

 

Why would I go through the process of paying square, having my customers sign up for a program and than when it does not work poperly have to change it or stop it?  That hurts me and my customers.  Square has no skin in the game.

 

What I notice is that no one at Square actually tried to understand how businesses operate.  It is more of an after the fact thing of "Oh I never thought of that" or "I can see how that can benefit you"  The real question should be why did you not see that before?

 

Square needs to engage with real business owners and how they operate when developing or refinding products.  They would have so much work cut out for them rather than just playing computer games, giving fake names and making false promises.

 

 

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Super Seller Alumni

@rsklar

 

I agree, more work needs to be done by square to understand business needs and then build the products according to those needs, rather than the other way around. 

 

I‘ve completed multiple surveys recently, and I hope more sellers will too, which will help accomplish this goal. They are working on it. 

Pesso - he/him
Pesso's Ices & Ice Cream
Square Super Seller - I'm here to help!
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Funny you mention that.  I get surveys - the one or two question type.  They are the same survey and I get it like 5 times in a row.  They have the same coding which means they are collecting only one answer set.  Can't figure that one out yet.

 

I have never received a survey for antying that would produce meaningful results.

 

I did like the clarification about the loyalty program and being reachable v. non reachable.  I think that if I capture peoples cell phone numbers, I should be able to send them a text message about a promotion.  Customers will take the path of least reistance and they are not going to enter their cell, then follow that through with going to an interface to enter an email address.  That is just asking too much and for square to think that is misguided.

 

Again why is Square making these "business" decisions for us?  They are not in the business of running our business, they are in the business of selling us tools for us to use as we see fit for our business.

 

 

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Super Seller

My wife and I have done 5 20-60 minute phone conference calls with different groups of people at Square looking for input about new features or how something could best be implemented and how we would use it in our actual business.  So they are taking real-world input from many users.  We have been using Square as our primary Credit Card processor for the last 5 years.

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@VanKalkerFarms To confirm, you're the #1 Supe Seller - correct? Does that mean that you're the top revenue business (top credit card revenue) for Square? You clearly spend a lot of time on the Boards with 100+ messages.

 

Have you seen a product roadmap, release document, or any other document that communicates the path forward? 

 

In your dialogs, are you suggesting that Square fixes the major bugs before building new functionality? I'm curious because it's basic.

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Super Seller

@GoodGrapes, "#1 Super Seller"  on this message board simply means that I have helped the most people solve the issues they are having with how to set up items, taxes, Square Stands, payroll, reader, devices, or just general business help outside of using Square (I have over 3,000 posts and over 2,500 people have liked my posts or marked them as best answers).  It has absolutely nothing to do with how much I process with Square thru my business, I can't imagine I'm even in the top 50% of business by volume.  We do a little over a million thru Square Credit Cards in 3 months (which is our retail season as we are a garden center then 180 acres of wholesale vegetables on our farm the rest of the year).  I purposefully set aside time multiple times a day (if I can) to help others on this board as it really can help someone that is stuck with what can be fixed with one screenshot or whatever to get their business rolling in the right direction.  Honestly, it feels good to be able to help others with what I have learned and know or to try to point them to someone else who would know.  That is what this user group is for and why I take a lot of my personal time to be on here.

 

I have not seen any internal roadmap, but I have a pretty good general idea of what is being offered in most of the areas Square offers services.  I have had 5 or 6 20-60 minute conference calls with different groups of people at Square that are either expanding/refining their current offerings or looking at adding functionality and they want people in the trenches reports.  I can tell you the Square POS is so much better than it was 5 years ago when we switched over to Square for 100% of our processing, they have added so many great features to the free POS. It is a free POS and does have its limitations as being such, it isn't a perfect fit for every business and that's why there are the mega POS solutions that cost $1,000s of dollars per station to operate.  Square has opened up having a POS to millions of businesses that didn't or wouldn't have had the opportunity to get all the useful sales statistics and paperless credit card management etc that Square offers.  Between the transparent rate structure, a revolution in the bait and switch hidden fee structure of the credit card processing world, and the free POS I think the good of Square outweighs the bad of Square 100 to 1. 

 

Are there features I want to be added?  Of Course, and I have hope that they will as the app gets updated.  The Beta testing group I am part of sees usually an update or two a week between ironing out bugs and adding a whole new feature.  Anyone can be part of the Beta app group, it is what I run on all my machines when in daily use.

 

Gotta go to my Son's soccer game.

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Is integrating it for online and invoicing in the works? Most of my transactions are through invoicing. 

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Super Seller

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 Oh man, I really hope it does. Thank you!

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So customers can't earn stars through invoice? Most of my transactions are invoiced based. Is there a way to manually enter or give stars to customers?

 

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If the customer is in the Loyalty Program you can add stars via the POS system. From the menu, select Customers. Search, find and open the customer profile. Scroll down to Available Rewards, Select Edit, and change the customers awarded stars.

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Hi @sagganis,

 

I share your frustration. The Loyalty Program software to be defect riddled. Here are a few examples I’ve encountered with basic usage:

 

  • When a bill / invoice is split, not matter how many times, each transaction is awarded the full loyalty points. The points should be allocated based on the amount paid by each person.
  • The Loyalty Program is based on a telephone number yet it in some instances it groups or excludes participants based on email address.
  • In some, not all, instances a customer / profile can only be added to one category. I’ve been told that one of criteria for adding a customer to a group is what information is entered with the 1st For example, if an email address is added in the 2nd or beyond transaction, they might not be allocated to a Square defined category. If this is accurate, there is no point in collecting additional customer information as you get to know the customer because the category lists aren’t dynamic. The categories should be dynamically created based on the client profiles current information.
  • I’ve been told by Tech Support that one reason a customer didn’t show up as a Loyalty Participant is that their email address wasn’t submitted via the Loyalty Status Page. I don’t understand this since the customer submits their phone number to join. Another “reason” was that the customer’s email address was later “manually” added.
  • “Reachable” has been defined as email reachable. I don’t know why text is considered a form or reaching a customer.
  • The contents of every customer category group accessed on the POS ipad is wrong. This includes Loyalty and non-Loyalty participants.
  • I’ve been told by Tech Support that a Loyalty participant will have 2 profiles if they used 2 different credit cards. The driver for the Loyalty profile is the phone number and a profile holds multiple credit cards. Additionally, it provides false data on the number of customers (2 profiles for 1 customer).

 

The software is defect riddled and unreliable.

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I agree it is a faulty system. There is no rhyme or reason for some customers getting stars on prepaid card or credit cards.

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It's frustrating that there are no noticable improvement on this defect riddled software. I either have 791 or 286 Loyalty customers depending upon which "counter" I use. It's unreasonable that the defects have been open for so long. When I'm asked by other business owners what I think of Square, the first thing I tell them about is the Loyalty Program - the price, the defects, the lack of progress on fixing the defects, the inability for a customer to use more than one earned credit ($10 in my case) on a single purchase (negative customer experience), and the lack of communication from anyone at Square on when defects will be fixed and new functionality will be added. Yet, the monthly fee hits my checking account like clockwork.

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Admin

 

@GoodGrapes If you haven't already, please report any discrepancies to our Support team so our engineers can investigate this. We certainly want to make sure that the Loyalty program working for you and fix any issues quickly. 

 

I will share your request for allowing a customer to redeem more than one credit during a sale with our Loyalty team. Any time a new feature is released we announce it in the Community but it sounds like we need a better way to let everyone know about our progress! 

️ Helen
Seller Community Manager

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Anyone know how to unmerge 2 loyalty members? I merged 2 loyalty members and it was quickly apparant that the loyalty stars weren't merged. It was apparant because we just finished a transaction and she new the number of stars for that loyalty membership / phone number. This was done in front of the customer, she wasn't pleased, and I was embarrassed. I've merged other loyalty members in the past not knowing of the defect that didn't combine the loyalty stars so I've inadvertently taken away earned stars from lots of customers.

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Admin

Hi @GoodGrapes, thanks for surfacing and I'm so sorry to hear about the experience this caused with your customer. I went to check on the ability to un-merge a customer for Loyalty, though there isn't a way undo this action at this time.

 

Our Loyalty Team is tracking this issue—I will raise your post to them and point out how the option to undo would help remedy any awkwardness between sellers and their customers. Please do keep in touch for updates.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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Hi Tom. Thanks for the response. The most direct solution would be to fix the software defect - loyalty points should be merged when customers are merged. Until the defect is fixed, which hopefully will be very soon as Square is aware of the defect, have the software stop recommending merging duplicate customers as there is no way to know that the merging of customers will result in the loss of loyalty points, which is unacceptable. Thirdly, add a message to the dashboard that merging of customers will result in the loss of loyalty points. Unmerging customers would be useful for other reasons in addition to working around the software defect.

 

How do I get on the list to be notified of software defect fixes?

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Admin

Thanks for your reply and for the insight about messaging, @GoodGrapes—I'll surface this as well.

 

As for the loss of Loyalty points when you merge a customer profile, you can manually restore your customer's Loyalty status from the Point of Sale app or online Square Dashboard. For step-by-steps, have a look here: Manually Adjust a Customer’s Loyalty Status. I realize that this isn't completely streamlined, though I hope it does help maintain goodwill with your customers for these situations.

 

Regarding your last question, we do not currently offer an email subscription for software updates. To keep in touch on this issue—be sure that you're subscribed to this thread as we'll post any developments that may help everyone out.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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