Findlay Hats review for Smile: Loyalty Rewards Program

Oct. 31, 2018

Love the concept of the app, but fairly frustrated with the customer support and troubleshooting thus far. Pros: The Concept & Easy to set up. Cons: Zero troubleshooting, no customer support over the weekend We have had 2 major hurdles with our app since starting it earlier this week. We reached out on Thursday evening for help with an issue and had moderate help throughout the day via chat on Friday, but the issue was not solved, and we were told we had to wait until Monday for this issue to be fixed when another rep would be back who could better assist me. Not a major issue, but still frustrating. The second issue seems to be a glitch in the app or something wrong with how we set it up for our VIP Tiers, not sure. This is causing our customers to not show up higher than the lowest tier, regardless of qualifiers achieved. We reached out on Friday for help, but their customer service was gone for the weekend, including the email listed for urgent requests. I handle a lot of apps, from a lot of developers and usually can find the solution to problems like this fairly quickly. However, the smile backend has zero troubleshooting help that I can find for this issue. It has very clear and defined info on how to set something up, but zero guides on how to troubleshoot any problems that arise. I understand people don't want to work weekends, but for an app of this size, and this importance, I feel this is inexcusable. The internet never closes and having an app that literally requires direct customer engagement and involvement like this needs a support team that can help every day of the week. Regardless of the lack of support over the weekend, there is still a huge problem with no troubleshooting help, and it confuses me an app of this size can care so little for helping their customers through problems. Give us the power to solve problems ourselves if you aren't going to have a weekend shift. We announced our rewards & VIP program, then immediately got hit with customer service questions from our customers who are angry, confused or frustrated that their VIP tiers are not showing up correctly. So our customers who were most excited to take advantage of this program, are getting an introduction to our rewards program in a negative way. This simple error here has lead to a pileup of work for us, frustrated customers and a steady 5+ hours of work on my end within the app trying to fix it alone. I imagine my problem here is not that complicated to fix, but I am at a standstill. Not a great start to an app we were excited about. Lesson learned though, we should never launch a new app like this prior to the weekend if they don't have 7 days a week customer support. Update: Raised review to 3 stars after being reached out to about this issue on Monday. Update2: Back down to 2 stars. It does the basics, and we will continue to use it due to not having the time to set up a new plan on another platform until after the holidays. I have 3 new issues to share here. Issue 1: VIP Program. We downgraded to the free plan because the VIP program did not go as intended. From the beginning, it simply was not clearly defined and caused a lot of confusion. As a result, I was having trouble getting people set up in the appropriate VIP tiers for past purchases, and I followed some advice from their CS team to temporarily change from a dollars VIP program to a points VIP program. I was not informed, nor smart enough to notice, that in doing so there are no safeguards in place to stop you from rewarding hundreds of customers with thousands of dollars in free merchandise. As suggested, we changed to a point system temporarily to see if that would help get people to the proper tier, and due to the ratio of dollars to points being way off (1000 points is wayyyy easier to get then $1000 spent) hundreds of customers automatically qualified for our top tier VIP program without actually spending the money to do so. We made a huge mistake and had to cancel the program altogether - in addition we then had to honor many free gifts for our customers due to the mistake, and offer alternative prizes to those who qualified for a tier we simply couldn't afford to do (multiple people who $100+ value in products). This was largely my mistake, not theirs, but a simple warning somewhere along the way mentioning that the dollars to points ratio does not change automatically when you change the VIP qualifiers would have saved a major headache. Such a situation should have a warning in place prior to rewarding hundreds of people. Issue 2: Referrals. We have free stickers on our website as a great first touch for new customers. However, the referrals program will still work for people who are referred to our website, but end up just purchasing free stickers, and nothing of value. Despite the "this coupon only works if the customer spends $X or more" the referrer still gets the referral bonus regardless of amount spent. Not an issue for companies that don't have free products on their site, but a major issue for us. We do have a note on our FAQ page that notes a referral where the customer spends under $10 will be automatically removed and then we manually remove any of these referrals on the back end. Seems like this would be an easy fix, but when confronted about it Smile was unable to help us. Issue 3: Integration at the free level. The lack of any integration with the free plan is frustrating, especially when we want to simply integrate it with our customer service platform. As a result, any customer service related issues in regard to this app (a daily thing) have to be manually adjusted in the app itself, instead of the customer service app ticket. I do not want to upgrade to the $100+ a month just to integrate this app into our customer service app. Alrighty, I am done rambling. Hope this helps.