On Tuesday I wrote about a rash of e-Rewards account shutdowns purportedly due to discrepancies in members’ account details and/or survey activity.
In response to that post, Ollie from e-Rewards reached out to me…
@FrequentMiler Hi Greg! Do you have an email address we could contact you on? -Ollie
— e-Rewards US (@eRewardsUS) March 22, 2017
Oliver Judge, a Social Media Executive at Research Now, emailed me to explain what was going on. That was great, but in my opinion his initial message didn’t really help to shed any light on things. He wrote:
We’ve recently been making some recent changes to improve the quality of our product. The first change was to sunset our mobile app, this is so we can focus on further improving our mobile web experience. We have also suspended a number of accounts that are either inactive or have inconsistent data, we’re currently working with affected users as closely as possible.
I suggested that they should let members redeem rewards as a goodwill gesture, but he didn’t bite at that opportunity (seriously Ollie, I’d be writing a very complimentary post if you had!). Instead, he suggested the following:
The steps we encourage members to take are:
- If the member believes their account has been suspended in error they should contact us over email, Facebook or by phone.
- If they receive the suspension message they should reply on the channel they received the message from.
- In their response the member should supply their email address and any supporting information.
We will then investigate their account and evaluate whether their account can be reinstated.
So there you have it. Even though people who asked about their shutdowns were told “we have had to suspend your account permanently,” it is apparently a review-able call. So state your case via email, Facebook, or phone and then get ready for a long wait. Ollie added the following:
Our support staff have received an influx of enquiries so we’d urge our members to be as patient as possible.
Here is e-Rewards contact info:
Members can email us and request a call back through our contact page here: http://www.e-rewards.com/home.do?lc=en_US
Our Facebook page is located here: https://www.facebook.com/eRewardsUS/
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I’ve been unable to get in to the app but my account is still OK online and I just completed a survey. Used it to top up airline miles. A lot of work for little return. Think I’ll try and get to the next milestone asap!
Hmm…get curiouser and curiouser…
They’ve now removed their most recent post from their Facebook page, thereby eradicating most of the comments from ex-members.
This is clearly for keeps, maybe they’re going bust, maybe new management is shaking things up, maybe their clients finally wised up to how poor their selection processes were.
Glad I cashed out a while back, I only lost a few thousand points on my UK account, and just over £4 on my Valued Opinions account, which Research Now has also pulled a fast one on.
I’ve had a great relationship with E-Rewards for several years now which has enabled me to get enough Hertz Rewards points for 3 weeks of car rentals every 2 years. My only complaint is the limit in how often you can redeem you E-Rewards money for points for one reward partner. Once a quarter for Hertz is not enough considering how much of the E-Rewards money I manage to generate.
I gave up on e-rewards a few years ago . It seems like I would answer 20 or 30 questions before being rejected as ‘ not qualified for the survey ‘ . This happened consistently over and over . I never earned any points because I answered a lot of questions yet I never qualified . I came to consider e-rewards a ruse , a scam , a dishonest company . Now it sounds like they may be more blatantly cheating people . I am not surprised.
…or people could think objectively about how they value their time and realize that e-Rewards is a tremendous waste.
@Mon said “company feels very un-customer friendly” — don’t forget, when it comes to monetizing data, you’re not the customer, you’re the product!
Greg, what’s Ollie’s email?
Fool me once ….. and they did. They get no second chance, and they got nerve to think they should. Come to think of it, the response makes the offense worse, and it almost sounds like a spoof. Is this a verified company representative?
Greg, thanks so much for pursuing this. I’m glad to see a response from e-Rewards and hope that this time they will reply to my request for more info on my account closure. This time I’ll be including a link to this blog entry, so hopefully they’ll have more motivation to reply!
It is amazing to me that some of us have been doing surveys for years and all of the sudden we are all not accurate. No warning, just take away our accounts along with the money. Something is not right about this. I don’t care about doing surveys with this company anymore. My trust is gone. I just want the money that is owed to me.
Fun fact: I’ve earned 21,500 miles in various programs through E-Rewards in the last six months. I just do them every evening
I just noticed that redeeming points for Best Buy or Gamestop GCs can only be done once per quarter for BB and once per 180 days for GS. That’s crazy.
This kind of response is exactly why I have avoided e-rewards. Who company feels very un-customer friendly. No thank you!
As someone who has occasionally blown through surveys to get points (I stopped a couple of years ago as the points return on my time got so low, so I’m also inactive), I can certainly understand shutting down inconsistent accounts. I quickly figured out that the more roles in my company I put down, the longer the survey, so I often chose only the one title/role I thought they were interested in that day, and didn’t worry too much about being internally consistent, nor consistent across multiple accounts. I didn’t lie, exactly, but I certainly didn’t give them a honest and useful demographic. If people like me (or people who are even more ‘inconsistent’ in their answers over multiple surveys) get shut down, I say just move on…