Saturday, January 21, 2012

Which one to choose - Payback or Loyalty ?

I recently visited the Pantaloons outlet at Noida. Now, to my surprise, they were not accepting the Payback card that i had signed up for recently. The card, being promoted by the Future Group, which is the group owning Pantaloons, and the Pantaloons logo being clearly visible on the card, still the employees did not accept the card. Instead, they only used the Pantaloons green card that has been there for some years now.

It is actually surprising to see that a major like Future group has such mismanagement about flagship programs. What should a consumer do in such situations - go for the Pantaloons card, or the Payback loyalty card?

5 comments:

VAANI said...

Hi,

Could you please share your card number at vaani.krishna@payback.net

PrattzzHackzz said...

Hello there.
Its actually good to see someone from payback take note of the matter. This shows how conscious Payback GMBH is. I will soon be sending you the requested details.


Guess what, the power of internet does show !!

vinay said...

Hi,the same thing happened with me yesterday.I went to the pantaloons showroom in Brookfields Mall,Coimbatore(TN)yesterday.When i thought of giving my payback card to the person in the billing counter,he said they have not adopted the program even now.WTF?The card was implemented by future group in september-october 2011.Feels these retail giants with the partnership of Payback are cheating the customers.No wonder why the conversion rates of Payback cards are going down..Loyalty is something which is to be earned from the customers,not something which you get just by implementing a so called"payback card".

PrattzzHackzz said...

Hello Vinay
Payback in India happens to be iMint which was initially promoted by Bharti(i remember iMint being in existance since 07). Even now there's confusion with companies.

The problem is retail structure in India. Companies need to understand that such issues should not happen in case they want people to be loyal to their brands or chains. In case they have issues, they should not promote such programmes in the first place. Reliance has this sorted out pretty well with its own single loyalty card called Reliance One. Future group on the other hand is the most unsorted group. Its chains - ranging from big bazaar(and the tradematk bazaar group of chains) to hometown or fairprice(the wholesale store in parallel to big bazaar), Spencer(the highly misplanned retail chain) or even future capital gold finance. This chaotic system needs to be improved. Even they should understand about the brand identity policy that companies like Airtel and Reliance invest heavily on.Just two days back, i attended a lecture by Mr Manish Gupta, GM, Research at IBM(he's been felicitated by Barack Obama for his contribution to Blue Gene), and he also mentioned that brand identity and loyalty was a very serious business factor (while citing an example of a company who lost a huge customer just because one of his connections were disconnected due to late payment).

Thanks for visiting. Hoping to hear back from you soon

PH

Anonymous said...

Very nice information about payback Program is seems very helpful.