"Rewards" - again.

[Steve Watts]

Jerry - wearing your supporter hat, can you liaise with the club that this whole sorry episode is a hot mess.  I struggle to see how anyone at the club have looked at this for half a season and thought "You know what, our fans are gonna love this"!  

We have half a season to spend points on stuff that is unobtainable before they're expired at the end of the season.  Unless we want to enter a prize draw, which is all that anyone can spend points on, meaning that if even only half of STH's enter then the odds are 8000/1 of winning.

The thread linked below has pretty much most of the negatives that I've seen over my first 10 mins of looking at the scheme.  

Between this and the prices for the cup match, the club seem to be scoring more own goals than penalties! (admittedly not difficult!)

Apologies for the rant, but I think we'd all like the club to come out and explain just what we (genuinely) have here to get excited about!  The club have had an absolute mare here.

 

[JerrySLO]

Thanks for this Steve, I'm on the case I'll speak to Charlie the guy who called you.

 

Cheers Jerry

[Steve Watts]

Hi Jerry, 

Sorry if I sound like a dog with a bone here, but a few more....observations....if you like on the "rewards" (sorry - I still can't bring myself to unquote the word).

• Pricing is all over the place a £5 gift voucher for 120 pts = 4p per point.  £30 tee-shirt for 250 pts = 12p per point.  None of the pricing really follows any pattern.
• The offerings are still awful and are just things that the club shop can't shift.  Whilst the gift voucher is welcome, to restrict it to 1 per person is pointless.  Other than that we get the atrocious tin pot Man City half and half lanyards.  I mean, come on....there's no way you'd be able to keep a straight face whilst telling us any of that half and half stuff was a good idea!  In the main, only the day-trippers will have been interested in that, and going by the amount of unsold stock in the shop, I would be amazed if that stuff didn't see a loss,
• The child points thing that @Silvio Dante raised.  When the manager of the rewards scheme phoned me, he told me that it is possible but that the rewards team would prefer not to.  I unfortunately didn't save his number as I will have messaged him to get my sons points moved over if I had.
• Are the winners of the draws going to be announced somewhere?  All we've seen is our points balances drop with nothing to show.
• Finally (on the rewards), I note you've asked for Silvio's contact number so that the rewards manager can phone him like he did me, but I actually think the point he raised about kids entering raffles is too big to be answered in a private phone call.  This, and all questions surrounding the scheme, should be responded to publicly as we're all members of the scheme.  To do otherwise results in mixed messages, such as the above point about transferring between cards.

One further thing away from the rewards....

The third shirt and the stock image badge.....please tell me the board are aware of the public ridicule surrounding it and will be looking to make changes.  The optimist in me is hoping that it's a way of gauging fan opinion before they go into mass production. Of course, the best way to gauge fan opinion is to engage the fanbase, which the club have been pretty poor about this last few months.  FWIW I love the colour, evoking memories of happier times, though it does seem to be a bit hit and miss on here and social media.  The brighter shade of the socks is also quite jarring (I'm aware there's precedent for this with this colour kit, but it does look strange imo).  But no matter how nice the shirt is, it'll be the badge and not the colour that will affect sales.  And not in a positive way.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Steve Watts