Sunday, March 4, 2012

If you owned a business would you rather inform all your customers that you accidently rewarded them too much so your taking it back or just build some positive brand equity with them and come out looking like your a stand up company???

For me the deciding factor would have to be exactly how much monetary value was actually being credited whether it be cash, points for gift certificates, prize raffles or gift cards along with exactly how many customers were credited too much in the first place.

I bring all of this up because this situation occured to me, I haden't even noticed that my account had been credited with an extra 0 to my reward after I completed a survey. Instad of being 110 it was 1100. I checked out what the value of points would be in relation to gift certificates and it's about $2.50 that MYVIEW had incorrectly paid their "employees". By employees I mean unemployed, bored, retired, possibly desperate, broke, or sometimes its just someone who has extra time on their hands and are on the computer basically all day anyways, ppl like me who were answering their surveys online.

Now, I have no idea how many participants/employees they have filling out surveys in total or how many of those said employees actually fillled out THIS survey so obviously I have no idea whether they would have sustained a loss of $10 million or $100 but if I had to guess I think it'd be a pretty safe bet to say that it's somewhere in the middle. I myself think its probably on the lower end and would have thought the users they alienated would outweigh those losses but they took the opposite stance.

Although I received an apologetic letter it certainty didn't make up for My View's policy of "Indian Giving" to take a term from my childhood.  Even if they did something along the lines of give 220 points instead of the 110/1100 then that would have shown they understand THEY made a mistake and still want their users to feel appreciated but to just take back 990 points with an "i'm sorry" does not cut it. If the grocery store had given me change for $10 instead of $1 would they email me and ask to come in because they are taking my money back???

All in all it just seeems like TERRIBLE BUSINESS POLICY TO ME, WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK?

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