Gift Card Promotions ($200/$50)

[andrew-h-23]

I'm sure many of you have heard of or experienced this issue, but here is my story to add to the rest of them. I redeemed my Fios Internet $200 dollar gift card last week, making my family laugh when I said they will just email it to me with no issue. That worked fine with the $50 XBOX promotion (probably since it impacts profits of a partnership, not Verizon itself). The Verizon gift card on the other hand is nigh impossible to get. I called support and was redirected due to the fact the number I used to call was associated to a  business account - making them route me to their business support line. They gave me another number to call but this ended up being XFINITY support - NOT FIOS. They weren't even able to find an account using the account or mobile number there. I'm not going to call a third time today because I know how this system works - I'll just post about it. 

If you aren't the Verizon rep, keep reading to understand why getting the gift card isn't as easy as simply redeeming it.

Looking up this problem, it is not an issue needing a solution but rather a feature of Verizon's predatory marketing scheme. The idea is that if they make it as difficult as possible, they can offer more to clients than they are actually willing to give. Think about it like this - Verizon gets about 50,000-60,000 subscribers in a year (2021/22) . Assuming this $200 dollar offer is there all year (I have no reason to think its not, I see people complaining about this offer as far back as 7 years ago), that equates to about $11 million in gift cards. Not a fun amount of money to give away for free.

To help cushion this blow, Verizon employs a strategy of "hard steps" to activate the gift card (Think of any Nathan for You episode, but specifically the gas station rebate one). Instead of hiking up a mountain and solving riddles to potentially get a rebate, we get to call every department in Verizon and be told to wait in hopes that we will either give up completely or run out of time to redeem or use our gift card and then give up. On average I have seen people get a response after they make a post (which they have to respond to a DM from) about how they tried to call Verizon at least twice, after waiting 2 days for the gift card to be redeemed, all after waiting for a specific 30 day frame 3 months into service.

Lets say that's an average of 20% (1/5) of people forget to redeem the gift card in the appropriate period and then those who do are fairly determined to get it, so only 5% (1/20) give up at any given step afterward. Check my math , but that is 100%*80%*95%*95%*95%*95%=65%. This means out of the 11 million Verizon "offers" to its clients, they only need to give out 7.17 million, saving almost a whole $4 million a year. Increase the chance someone gives up in subsequent steps to 1 in 10 and Verizon saves another $2 million.

Working in finance, I understand that a good company would have financial planners working with marketing to ensure that they can offer as much as possible without having to actually realize the RISK of people cashing in on promotions, or have that impact important financial metrics. Point is, that if I were Verizon, I'd plan for about $5.7 million in gift card expenses per year with a standard deviation of 2.2 million. This means VERIZON HAS NO INTENTION OF EVER MAKING GIFT CARDS MORE EASY TO GET. IT IS A PART OF THEIR BUSINESS PLAN TO MAKE OFFERS DIFFICULT TO REDEEM.

Overall if you are trying to get your gift card, posting @verison on social media or putting something on this form are really your only options (maybe call them to make it look like you tried, but also who cares if they clearly don't) .

[KH-OrnEsh]

Hi @andrew-h-23 

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