Square Loyalty : reward not reinstated after a return & money spent not cumulative

[Shopcolies]

I'm having a lot of issues with square loyalty. 

1. We noticed this week that if a customer buys a $65 dress and has a $20 reward making their total with tax $48.15, if they return their dress for a store credit they receive a credit for $48.15 but their reward is not added back to their account. 

2. Why is money spent not cumulative? Our program it set up for give 1 star for every $50 spent. If someone spends $30 one day and $20 the next they are not awarded a star. For $45 a month per location this isn't something myself or employees should have to keep up with. We would have to hire a whole person just to make sure people are getting the correct stars for what they've spent. And I have seen the answer of just lower you amount spent threshold but even so if its not cumulative their stars are still going to be off at some point. 

3. I've also had several customers sign up and not receive any stars. For example one customer purchased $120 at one store then $65 at out other store and mentioned about not seeing her stars. When I looked she had none. For the 120 she should have received 2 stars and for the 65 she should have received one star and she put in her # both times. This isn't the first time this has happened either. I called square the first time and spoke with a "loyalty specialist" who could not figure out why stars were not added and after about 45 minutes and speaking with other specialist they finally said it was a glitch and to just add stars. Obviously its more than a one time glitch.

for $45 a month per location (and I have two) this isn't seeming like its worth it unless I'm missing something and these issues can be fixed. I know you can add stars but we shouldn't have to be adjusting stars and rewards that often. We've only had the program for about 3-4 months and its seeming to be a bigger hassle than its worth. 

[TheRealChipA]

@Shopcolies I spent a little time doing research here, like you did, just to be sure something wasn’t lurking out there I did not know about.  So, between that research and my own experience, here is what I can tell you.

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1. We noticed this week that if a customer buys a $65 dress and has a $20 reward making their total with tax $48.15, if they return their dress for a store credit they receive a credit for $48.15 but their reward is not added back to their account. 

This seems to be an unfixed issue from what I can see.  I can see that, in the case of a refund of an entire transaction where loyalty points were redeemed, the refund process probably should add the loyalty points back to the customer’s account.  However, this would not fix the case where only part of a transaction was refunded — should a percentage of the points be refunded, none, all?  Every seller would be different.  Regardless, right now Square assumes that you will decide based on a review of the receipt how many points to add back to a customer’s account.  Hopefully you don’t see a lot of cases like this!

2. Why is money spent not cumulative? Our program it set up for give 1 star for every $50 spent. If someone spends $30 one day and $20 the next they are not awarded a star. For $45 a month per location this isn't something myself or employees should have to keep up with. We would have to hire a whole person just to make sure people are getting the correct stars for what they've spent. And I have seen the answer of just lower you amount spent threshold but even so if its not cumulative their stars are still going to be off at some point. 

As I’m sure you have seen, you are not the only seller to have asked that question recently.  That doesn’t change the fact that points are awarded based upon the current sale only.  I’ve seen no announcements of a change to this polity.

For both of these, you can make formal feature requests here.  When you submit those, Square’s Loyalty Product Team will review them and inform you of their plans, if any.

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3. I've also had several customers sign up and not receive any stars. For example one customer purchased $120 at one store then $65 at out other store and mentioned about not seeing her stars. When I looked she had none. For the 120 she should have received 2 stars and for the 65 she should have received one star and she put in her # both times. This isn't the first time this has happened either. I called square the first time and spoke with a "loyalty specialist" who could not figure out why stars were not added and after about 45 minutes and speaking with other specialist they finally said it was a glitch and to just add stars. Obviously its more than a one time glitch.

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This one has happened to me a few times.  In my case, most of time it happened was because the customer used a new credit card, or paid in cash, and forgot to inform us they were a loyalty customer so that we could add them to the sale.  Once or twice, it happened because the customer had two or more entries in my customer database — something that was caused by them using more than one credit card over the years.  When they signed up for loyalty, they did so for one of those cards or maybe even for none of them, but then when they used another card and/or when they told us to find and attach them to the current sale we attached a random customer record and not the one that had loyalty attached to it.  I fixed this easily by first merging their customer records from the dashboard, and then adjusting their points.  I’ve made it a point to do a regular customer merge of duplicates every month or so.

I’ve never seen any other reasons for points not being assigned.

Sorry I can’t be more help.  One last thing… if you decide to submit those two feature requests, let me know and send me a link to them.  I’ll be sure to add my support to both of them since I think they are features that lots of sellers would benefit from.

Chip