Seeing my hard earned reward points lapse, I decided to redeem them. The catalog looks all colorful (lists Electronics, leather items, and many others), but when you finally go to redeem online the options are vastly limited (mostly Paulo Coelho books, a few gift vouchers, and couple of board games).
From the limited options, I chose Mattel Scrabble for 995 points and received it promptly. It was "ok", but not great (the Scrabble set I owned earlier had counters too... you could keep track of your scores without pen and paper). In the "redeem online" dropdown menu, there was another Scrabble option but for 580 points more. I presumed that more points would mean better quality (and those score counters would surely be in). I selected it (thinking I can gift the first set to some newbie to scrabble), but to my shock, I received an identical item. I guessed it was sent by mistake, and emailed [email protected] immediately. Here's my email:
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Recently I redeemed "Scrabble - English" against 1575 points. But, I got "Mattel Scrabble"
instead which goes for 995 points. Moreover, please note that last month I had redeemed
the exact same item (Matel Scrabble) and the reason for choosing a similar gift this month
is that I wasn't satisfied with the previous gift. And now, thanks to your fault, I have two of
them. :(
Please do the following:
* send the item I had originally asked for
* arrange for collecting the item I had not asked for (the packing for the scrabble box is intact)
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I wasn't very sure this could be done easily. My guess was that ICICI would force me to retain
the unwanted gift and return my 580 reward points. This is when I got my second shock.
ICICI had deliberately sent this item (so, no question of returning the reward points). Here's
their response:
&&&&&&&&&&&&
Gift Item Matel Scrabble and Scrabble English is the same item with different item code for different reward points.
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Wow! Isn't that an amazing way an innocent customer and his/her reward points are soon parted?
The item is not listed in their catalog. Even the name is different. To top it, they respond with a "fooled you".
Yeah, I know, I must have checked a box somewhere that would contain a line like "ICICI Bank
can send you whatever it pleases...".
I would not have realized how bad this rewards program is had I not tried out the reward points program for my
Manhattan card (sorry for cross-advertising), but they have outsourced it to IndiaPlaza.in. The variety of gifts is amazing.
So, watch out when you redeem your points. Do not assume any correlation between the number of points and the quality of gifts. :(
For now, my only option is to finish off my remaining points getting Parker Pens (if they are available) and shift my usage to other cards.
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