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Overview

A loyalty program accumulates value in members’ balances over time, which makes its controls more important than in a campaign that pays out once. This page covers the controls available before points are issued and the corrections available afterward.

Limiting What Can Be Earned

Three layers decide whether an action produces points. Quality rules evaluate whether the event is legitimate before anything is rewarded — risk signals on the email domain and IP, event quality, and identity checks. They apply to every event. See Configuring the Rules of Your Program and Fraud and Anti-Gaming Protection. Reward rules decide who earns and how often — audience membership, conditions on the event data, and the reward behavior that controls repetition. See How to Set Up Reward Rules. Reward limits cap exposure. On a reward, set limits to alert you when too many rewards are fulfilled in an hour or a day. On a dynamic Collectible Reward, the required maximum per transaction caps what any single event can issue. In the Reward Bank, the minimum and maximum redemption values cap what a member can redeem at once.
Set the daily reward limit alert before launch. On a loyalty program the ways to earn are numerous and often automated, so a misconfigured event issues points at volume faster than anyone notices.

Blocking a Member

Where someone should stop earning entirely, block them rather than tightening rules that affect everybody. See How to Block Users and Decline Shares.

Looking Up a Member

Support requests about a loyalty program are usually about a balance the member expected to be higher. Everything needed to answer is in User Support.
  1. Navigate to User Support.
  2. Find the person with People Search or Event Live View.
  3. Open their profile to see their events, the rewards they have earned, and the evaluation results showing why a reward did or did not issue.
See Leveraging User Support Pages and How to Investigate a WISMR Request. Work through the causes in order:
A member who reaches the Reward Bank without being verified sees an empty bank rather than an error. Before investigating a missing balance, confirm how the member accessed the Redemption Center.

Adding Points Manually

Two paths, and which is right depends on why the points are missing. Create the missing event. Where the action genuinely happened but the event never reached Extole, create it in User Support > Create Event, preferring the campaign’s own event name. The reward then issues through the normal rules, so the member’s history stays accurate. See How to Manually Create a Referral or Other Event. Approve a failed reward. Where the reward was created and blocked by a rule you are willing to override in this case, approve it from the participant’s profile. See How to Approve Failed Rewards. Issue a reward directly. Where neither applies and the member should be given points. See How to Issue a Manual Reward. Prefer creating the event over issuing a reward directly. Creating the event leaves a record of what happened; issuing a reward leaves a record only that somebody granted it.

Expiring and Revoking Points

Supported Reward Bank Collectible Rewards can expire automatically after the date or delay you configure. Changing that configuration does not update rewards that members have already earned. To remove an individual reward manually, expire or revoke it from View Reward or over the API. Both actions are audited and accept a reason that is stored with the record.
  • Revoke a fulfilled or sent reward that should not stand — issued against an order later returned, or against activity found to be illegitimate.
  • Expire a reward that has reached the end of its life under your program terms.
Both are API operations; see Points and Balances. Extole does not automatically connect a return to the points issued for its original order. Your system or support process must identify the reward and revoke it.
Removing points is visible to the member and reduces a balance they may have been planning against. Record a reason on every removal, and make sure your program terms support the action before taking it at scale.

Giving Your Support Team Access

Team members can be limited to the User Support pages rather than given full administrative access, which is usually the right level for agents handling balance questions. See User Roles & Permissions and Inform Your Support Team About Your Extole Program.

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