When we take part in rewards programs or promotions, it’s easy to take it for granted that we’ll receive our reward as long as we fulfil the necessary criteria.
Credit card points/cashback, referral rewards, signup promotions, etc.
To be fair, we probably won’t encounter any issues most of the time.
But things can go wrong, and every once in a while, you’re bound to be met with some issues in receiving rewards.
When this happens, it’s entirely up to you to probe into and resolve the issue to get your rewards.
The fact is that the companies behind these programs don’t care about you not getting your rewards – unless you show them that you care.
Once you’ve done that, there’s a good chance you’ll be credited the rewards you’re due to receive, as long as you’ve met the criteria.
Below is a scenario that I recently encountered where I almost didn’t receive my referral reward.
Last month, my Revolut referral campaign was offering $100 for successful referrals – the highest cash reward I’ve seen so far.
Since my partner hadn’t used Revolut before, I decided to refer her to Revolut to earn that juicy referral reward.
At the same time, she could also start taking advantage of Revolut’s 20% cashback promotion for public transport.
The referral campaign requires the referee to request a physical card and make 3 transactions of at least $10 with either the physical card or a digital card, and my partner did all of this.
Not expecting any issues with the referral campaign, I waited for the campaign period to be over.
As it got closer to the expected date of receiving the reward, I decided to reach out to Revolut to confirm that my referral was eligible.
After checking in their system, Revolut responded saying that based on their records, my referee had not yet made 3 transactions of $10 or more, and thus my referral was ineligible.
I was confused and sent them a screenshot of my partner’s Revolut transaction history showing the 3 transactions that were made, but they insisted that they have no records of eligible transactions.
Then, I suspected that it was an issue with the payment still pending processing by the merchant even though the amounts had already been deducted from my partner’s Revolut account.
I communicated that this is an issue that we as customers have no visibility or awareness of as it seems as though my partner had already fulfilled all the criteria for the referral campaign.
Eventually, Revolut responded by saying that according to their system, the criteria had not been met during the campaign period, and so the system didn’t credit me with the reward.
However, they manually credited me $80 as a reward for my effort in promoting Revolut and the troubles I faced during the campaign.
It’s not quite the $100 I was hoping to receive, but given that they could’ve easily given me nothing, $80 is still a big win in my books.
I’m not saying that everytime you encounter an issue with receiving rewards, you’ll be able to get compensated for it just by making noise.
But I think that in some cases, if you push for it, these companies will give in to you in some way.
If you don’t even bother to check if you received your rewards or pursue the reason why you didn’t receive your rewards, then you’ll definitely end up losing out.
By being proactive about it, at least you have a chance to receive your rightful reward.