Employee Reward Point Abuse

[Foxpubs]

I have searched extensively and I have not been able to find anything on Employee Abuse with Loyalty Rewards points. Recently, over the last several months I have noticed reward points have been out of control in redemption. So I decided to dig in and see whats going on. I noticed that ALL of my FOH employees (Servers and Bartenders) had created personal Rewards accounts. When a customer did not want to create a customer account or was using cash, the FOH employee would then use their personal cell number or email and apply it to that customers check, thus adding the customers points to the employees account . Then the employees would use their personal Rewards account to REDEEM their fraudlent points on friends tickets, drinks, food, etc. One account had almost 50,000 points accruded on it. Also, the issue gets worse. TOAST allows reward memebers to link multiple credit cards to their accounts. Then the system will AUTOMATICALLY add points when any of those credit cards are used, to that persons/employees account. So anytime a customer comes in, that is not a rewards memeber, and employee used their account number on that customers checks in the past, now automatically gets their points anytime that customer comes in. There are No Controls to prevent employees or tags to send a notification, nothing...well at least that I can fine (Other then the generic email that TOAST DETECTED SUSPECIOUS BEHAVIOR). Shame on me for not looking sooner. Am I the only one with these problems? I spent the last 2 hours cross referincing the employees phones numbers / emails. and looking them up in the loyalty section, and removing ALL linked credit cards on each individual employee account. I also created an SOP for reward points if anyone would like it, that all employees must sign. Something needs to be done on TOASTs back end to at the very least to monitor and flag employee use. Im now checking daily, like an asset monitoring employee for a big chain store. Anyone???

[au79teahouse]

Toast does offer a report on suspicious rewards activity. You can find more info here:
https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Taking-Action-Against-Suspicious-Rewards-Activity

Make sure you also sign up Toast' new Loyalty Misuse Reporting her:
https://www.toasttab.com/customers/shop/test-kitchen/shop-item-loyalty-misuse

[Foxpubs]

Thanks. I signed up for the Beta and have been added to the wait list, will see when I can get access to that. And yes, we get the suspecious activity reports, but the employees are smart, and that report does not get nearly. The employees should be crossed referenced with phone number and or email address with the Rewards program and the Employee information. Would make it much easier to monitor and detect. Perhaps the new Beta has this??? Ill have to wait and see. Thanks again!

[au79teahouse]

I agree with you. There is definitely room for improvement. However, no system is perfect and there always are people who will find a way to cheat the system. 

A side note. Remember to unlink all the credit cards linked to accounts in questions. So those accounts do not receive points when linked cards are used for payment.