"Duplicate" Rewards Accounts because of Gift Cards

[nbunda]

An issue that causes so much confusion for our staff is duplicate rewards accounts that are created when a guest with an existing rewards account uses a gift card.

The next time they try to manually add rewards, the staff will see the guest listed twice. I've looked into this each time, and the second one is always linked to a gift card they had used. Now, when this happens, it appears the rewards balance is internally linked between the two accounts, which is good, but the staff has no way of verifying that, and it leads to frustration for the staff and guest. There has to be a way to do it better. I personally think the days of rewards balances being tied to physical gift cards should be left in the past.

It also creates a concern for me that if someone gets a hold of another person's gift card that happens to be linked to their loyalty account, a bad actor could potentially use the gift card to always have access to the original guest's rewards account.

Is this a concern/issue for anyone else? Is there something else I'm missing that causes this?

[HearthpizzeriaB]

At least with the gift cards we can order from toast, you can use the QR code to register a gift card as a stand alone rewards account for a customer. I assume the ability to do that is what causes the issues we are having.

[rcmck]

Yes the issue is every gift card is also a rewards account, and every rewards account is also a gift card.

[HearthpizzeriaB]

agree.

[HearthpizzeriaB]

Not to take this off on a tangent, however I have had a husband and wife want to merge their rewards accounts. It is a major pain in the neck. For the record, if you have two accounts with different emails, they cannot be combined. You need to edit one of the accounts to have the same email address as the other account you want to merge it with.

[rcmck]

On the topic of rewards, anyone else experiencing rewards not being selectable after running a credit card sometimes? They show up on the screen but you can't do anything with them, have to cancel or skip and reapply them and adjust the payment.