What can we learn from Rhone’s Loyalty Program?

I’ve been a Rhone customer for probably about three or four years. Ever since I found them through actually an ad on Facebook. And during that time, I’ve placed over 30 orders. I’ve spent about $4,000 with them. I think it was like $3,900 to be exact.

They have this rewards program, which I enjoy very much. It’s a good way to reward customer loyalty for your brand. I think loyalty programs are great and so I’ve consistently used Rhone’s program. I let it build up to about $40–50 and I go shopping.

And I buy probably about $100 — $300 worth of clothes at a time.

So this past weekend, I noticed that they were running a Black Friday deal. And I said, listen, why not? I could use some additional shirts, maybe a vest. Let’s take a look at what they have. So I went onto the website.

And first of all, the rewards program isn’t super user friendly. The functionality of the rewards program is based on discount codes, which means you can’t stack it on top of other discount codes. Not super user friendly. You basically have to activate the reward that you want, so if you want to use 40 points, you have to activate it and then copy and paste the discount code through the checkout process. Not super user friendly.

The way that it should be is the way the DU/ER has it. They just give you the option at checkout to activate your rewards, to use the rewards that you have on file. That’s really the way that it should be. It should be completely seamless.

So this past weekend, was running a Black Friday sale and I said, you know, listen, why not? I’ll go on and use my rewards points. I’ll make a purchase, save a couple of bucks, refresh my wardrobe a little bit. I was ready to spend two, three hundred bucks.

So I go on the site and I pick a couple of items that I want and lo and behold, I can’t use my rewards.

I chat them up and I kind of had a sneaking suspicion that they’re not allowing people to use the rewards during the sale. And it wasn’t a sale that needed a discount code. It was just a flat percentage off.

So anyway, I chatted them up. I expected them to kind of, you know, immediately tell me, like, listen, you can’t use this discount code. But I feel like given my order history and I’m sure that they have the history on hand, they should have been able to bypass that.

That’s kind of what I expected.

Long story short, they weren’t able to bypass it. They offered me a fifteen dollar gift card and I’m left here wondering, like, man, this is a lot of broken glass to walk through to use my discount, after being a customer for three years or so. So it wasn’t a great experience.

The moral of the story is if you’re going to have a rewards program, make it easy to use, reward people for staying with you as a brand.