DBS’s Christmas spend and redeem promotion has been…eventful. It’s one of the simplest Christmas promotions to participate in (in the sense that the spending threshold is low and you don’t need to head down to a physical outlet to redeem your prizes), but the implementation has been nothing short of awful.
The game was supposed to draw people to the DBS Lifestyle app, but based on what I’m reading on this HWZ thread there’s a long line of unhappy campers. People are regularly reporting that the app is buggy, hangs for no reason, crashes outright sometimes and the promotion is regularly redeemed within minutes of being reset at 8 a.m.
I don’t have an issue with the promotion getting redeemed quickly per se, I mean thems the rules and all, but I do think it’s unfair that people camp out early morning only to have a technical glitch make that all for nothing.
It makes me wonder if DBS has made a rod for its own back by “decentralizing” its promotion and turning control (and point of failure) over to the customers (as opposed to Standard Chartered which does the drawing for its Shop Shake Win on its centralized back end and then SMSes customers to let them know what they’ve won).
In any case, a few people have written in to DBS about the promotion and thanks to Wil on the Telegram Group we got this message:
It appears that DBS is removing the 6 day play limit on the Spend and Redeem promo. That is, there’s no longer a requirement that you need to play the game within 6 days of making your purchase. This should be useful for those who bought items in November but couldn’t redeem a prize due to the various bugs and glitches early on. The T&C have been updated to remove this clause.
I still think the mechanics of this promotion weren’t quite right, especially given the lack of validation at the time of play. My understanding is that there’s some massive reconciliation exercise at the end of the promotion where DBS will check all the entries and claw back prizes from those who weren’t eligible.
But that sounds to me like an immensely manual process, and wouldn’t it be easier if the app could use data from ibanking to assign play chances accordingly? Because as it is, the current system violates one of the golden rules of programming- minimizing the need for manual input and the possibility of human error. For example, if you spent $150.05 but accidentally transposed the numbers as $150.50- does that mean your prize will get clawed back? A system where such data entry is not necessary from the user is undoubtedly a better designed system.
Hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll see the app’s stability improve.
Guess it’s time to say “Look Ma! I’m famous now!”
On a separate note, wonder if the $50K cash credit has been taken up
I am quite surprised the date of transaction or receipt number is not one of the fields to enter. Really wondering how DBS will be able to reconcile the gifts.
Eg if there is one transaction (out of multiple transactions with same transaction amount) which they deem to be not eligible, then which voucher would they clawback (in the form of asking for repaymemt of the cash value of the voucher).
This blog has been too slow and too soft in its criticisms of a shocking promotion by a bank who should have done better a month ago. Completely unacceptable that over a month in, these people are still trying to figure out how to code their app properly, and are still failing at it EDIT: I just remembered what made this promotion really offensive. I had to sit through an ad at the cinema the other day that would have cost thousands of dollars to produce and place. And it is all let down by a $2 app and a… Read more »
This is by far one of the most ridiculous and badly executed campaigns run by a bank. With the lack of validation, it is almost certain that campers who did not have eligible spend will be part of the 1,400 participants daily. If reconciliation is only done at the end of the promo period to validate every transaction, that would mean the actual pool of eligible plays will be dumbed down from this 1,400. Given all the data points DBS already has regarding our spending, it really is a throw back to the stone age to request for manual input… Read more »