#announcements

@Rob Ayre

@Srishty Khullar

Hey Bria! This is a tricky one. I’d heard from a customer of Influitive who set a 2 week period where people could redeem any outstanding points before all points were reset back to 0 for everyone with the new structure.

This is the cleanest approach Ive seen. Strategicallly though you have to make sure you have budget available to account for that two week period. This is also a great reengsgent technique to get people back in so you’ll want to make sure you have new fresh engaging content for folks to jump back into when they go to redeem their points.

Additionally, make sure in your comms and in your program you’re making it clear how the new point system will work so there are no surprises and you’re proactively answering members questions.

Speaking of communication you’ll want to have you lists and comms all set and send out a few notices and reminders leading up to and during the 2 week period to make sure no one feels they missed their chance. You can also enable you CS team to reach out to customers to let them know as well.

Once the two weeks is up you can reset to 0, set expirations, whatever you want really moving forward because you’re essentially wiping the slate clean.

We’d though to do this in our hub but the sheer number of outstanding points and the budget that would be required should we get a massive influx of redeemers come in just wasn’t really feesable at the time. So def carefully consider your estimates on what that 2 weeks could cost you. If memory serves the customer I referenced was $3-5k. Take a look at outstanding points, avg monthly costs, available rewards to get a sense of potential cost.

This is interesting @Bria Jones would you consider a forced redemption for the customers who do not use their points by the deadline?

Hi @Bria Jones completely understand the thought behind restructuring points. I’ve actioned this for a few our customers at Influitive, and there’s a couple of ways you can manage this depending upon the key goals behind the new points structure.
I’d be happy to chat further and offer insights on how to approach or answer any specific questions you may have ✨

@Rob Ayre great feedback, thanks! Totally agree about the comms plans. It's incredibly important to be transparent with customers, especially when they've been advocates for as long as many of them have been. I hadn't considered wiping out all the points at once, that's something to consider. It's a tricky situation, for sure though ha.

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) I don't know that we would need to do a forced redemption, though it could certainly be an option. Right now, most of our customers are only redeeming their points for passes to our user conference and that would be problematic for our conference budget ha. But I'm not overhauling the entire program right this second so that could be an option for 2025 once we've gotten folks to use up their points this year. We're planning to bump up the points required to attend for 2024, then formally launch an entirely new program in 2025. They can also use points for education services so we're doing some heavy promo for that too to get points used up.

@Srishty Khullar I'll happily take you up on that. There's a lot of layers to overhauling a 20 year old program! I'll DM you shortly, much appreciated!

@Bria Jones what is the goal in making the points expire for existing customers? I feel like that would just really annoy people. How many customers do you have with a lot of points who are still engaged? It would be easier to change the terms for any new customers. Let anyone currently in the program to be grandfathered in - or at least let all their old points be grandfathered and any new points have an expiration date. I feel like you will have to do a lot of comms and people will get annoyed even if they are not losing any real value - it doesn't feel very customer centric to do this to any loyal customers. And it will be a ton of work for you with a questionable positive business impact.