Sainsburys and Nectar Points

DCFC79

Guerins wrote: »

Why not let me redeem the points where I want to

Regards

Guerins

you can by changing the hom store, we use a variety of stores but only redeem the points at our home store,

cherrub

Guerins wrote: »

Why not let me redeem the points where I want to

Sainsburys told you why - you even stated in your first post.

"Because Sainsbury's have so many stores, we can't hold the details of Nectar card holders in each of the individual stores and so you have to have shopped in that store in the last 60 weeks for the info to be held in that store in order for goods to be released against Nectar points"

From the IT standpoint this almost certainly means there is some form of 'batch' process running overnight. This will pull together all the nectar information for the day and pass it back to the stores ready for use the next day. Due to the sheer volume of data your info is only passed to stores you've shopped at.

Having worked on these sort of systems (although not on the scale of Sainsburys) I know that the changes in functionality and capacity for the systems of both companies would be immense to meet your 'I need to spend it now' requirement.

I'm not sure why you think waiting 24 hours at Sainsburys is bad when you have to wait a month for Tesco to send out a voucher in the post to allow you to redeem your points!

Also - I checked Sainsburys website and it very clearly states in the Nectar FAQ that you will have to wait 24 hours to use points at a new store.

Guerins

The point here is that I wanted to redeem my points yesterday in a store of my choice, irrespective of where my local store is. I wasn't looking at Sainsbury's T&C's or anything else that stated I could not redeem them at that place at that time, bearing in mind I had redeemed points in the past. It is not customer friendly. It's bad systems management You can have a different point of view but when all said and done, I was the customer so don't I count in all of this. It wasn't a case of waiting 24 hours as I was 200 miles away from home so I am not likely to sit and wait for that store to reopen so I can spend less than £10

Obviously I look at this as a customer services excercise which simply does nothing to make this easy for the points redeemer, I have no sympathy with Sainsbury's. In October last year they announced a £466 million profit for the previous 28 weeks. Their properties are worth at least 1.8 billion so money here is simply not the issue. They could fix this if they wanted.

Regards


Guerins

Helix

Guerins wrote: »

The point here is that I wanted to redeem my points yesterday in a store of my choice, irrespective of where my local store is. I wasn't looking at Sainsbury's T&C's or anything else that stated I could not redeem them at that place at that time, bearing in mind I had redeemed points in the past. It is not customer friendly. It's bad systems management You can have a different point of view but when all said and done, I was the customer so don't I count in all of this. It wasn't a case of waiting 24 hours as I was 200 miles away from home so I am not likely to sit and wait for that store to reopen so I can spend less than £10

Obviously I look at this as a customer services excercise which simply does nothing to make this easy for the points redeemer, I have no sympathy with Sainsbury's. In October last year they announced a £466 million profit for the previous 28 weeks. Their properties are worth at least 1.8 billion so money here is simply not the issue. They could fix this if they wanted.

Regards


Guerins

So they must be doing something right then to be making that large a profit. Not changing the Nectar redemption system obviously isn't doing them any harm. It could be considered bad customer service, but its clear that not many customers find it an issue. Otherwise they would have fixed it or more people would be complaining.

Any

cherrub wrote: »

I'm not sure why you think waiting 24 hours at Sainsburys is bad when you have to wait a month for Tesco to send out a voucher in the post to allow you to redeem your points!

Also - I checked Sainsburys website and it very clearly states in the Nectar FAQ that you will have to wait 24 hours to use points at a new store.

Completely agree!! (and I love Tesco points:D).

Sainsbury's

Hi Guerins, I'm sorry you weren't able to spend your points in a store you hadn't shopped in before. With our current IT system, it's correct that you need to have swiped your card in the store your want to redeem your points in, within the past 60 weeks. Of course we do all sometimes shop in stores we haven't previously visited, and because of colleague and customer feedback like yours, last December we started a new process to enable a work-around solution at the Customer Service desk.

In your case, the colleague should have called their supervisor, who would have brought you over to the customer service desk, where after a quick call to Nectar, to check your points balance, you could spend the points you chose to redeem in £2.50 blocks. (500 points). I'm sorry this didn't happen and I do appreciate your frustration and questions on this. If you can let me know which store you visited, we'll remind the team there about this to avoid your situation happening again. Thanks for posting and I hope this helps!

drc

It's really frustrating. I have had lots of trouble redeeming Nectar points in Sainsburys. Their system seems very archaic. It's their loss as I prefer to buy in Tesco's where the points system is so much more simple and you get more points for your money.

Helix

drc wrote: »

It's really frustrating. I have had lots of trouble redeeming Nectar points in Sainsburys. Their system seems very archaic. It's their loss as I prefer to buy in Tesco's where the points system is so much more simple and you get more points for your money.

If you compare it to Tesco its more advanced, Tesco you have to wait for paper vouchers to be sent. Sainsburys you can redeem at any time, providing you comply with the rule of using it in a store you have shopped in, in the past 60 weeks.

DCFC79

Sainsbury's_Company_Representative wrote: »

In your case, the colleague should have called their supervisor, who would have brought you over to the customer service desk, where after a quick call to Nectar, to check your points balance, you could spend the points you chose to redeem in £2.50 blocks. (500 points).

would only work if the member of staff on the checkout actually knew if calling a supervisor would resolve it

Helix

DCFC79 wrote: »

would only work if the member of staff on the checkout actually knew if calling a supervisor would resolve it

Yep they were useless at telling us checkout staff anything, unless you worked in the mornings when the meetings happened. Otherwise we were rarely told about changes in policy.