Overview
In referral programs, there are several reasons why a participant may not immediately receive their reward. Delays can occur due to factors such as quality rule evaluations, unmet requirements, or configured waiting periods. As a result, one of the most frequent support inquiries is, “Where is my reward?” (WISMR). This is a guide on how to address these questions from your customers. If you are looking for more information on why a WISMR may occur, please review WISMR 101: Understanding Customer Reward Inquiries
For more info on the User Support section as a whole, check out Leveraging User Support Pages.
First, check if the user has been rewarded
To look up the status of a reward, follow these steps:
Click on User Support in the sidebar.
In the Search By dropdown, choose what you would like to search by (email, code/shareable, coupon, user-specific ID, or event ID) and click Search.
Click the person’s email to view their details.
If no customers were found by your search, double-check the information used to search by, or contact [email protected] for assistance.
Scroll down to the Rewards section to see all of the rewards that have been earned. If you see a reward has been earned for this referral, do one of the following:
If the reward is in a Sent state, click on the reward and hit the Resend button at the top right on the Reward Details page.
If the reward is in a Trying to Fulfill or Failed state, click on the reward to check the reason and address it if possible, then click on the Retry button.
If the reward has already expired and another one should be sent instead, check How to Manually Create a Referral or other Event.
If you would like to resend the reward to a different email address, or if you had issues executing any of the steps described above, please contact [email protected] for assistance.
If there's no reward yet, check the events associated with this person or with the persons they referred to determine the reason for the lack of reward (see below).
Next, if applicable, determine why the user was not rewarded
Users are not rewarded because they are either deemed ineligible, they did not actually complete the required activities of the referral program, or Extole did not receive these activities because they were completed offline. To look up the status of a user’s events, follow these steps:
View the events of a user in the Activity section of this person’s profile, or of the referred friend (if you know who was referred). Depending on the configuration of your referral program, you should be looking for the event that makes the participants qualified for a reward (e.g. made a purchase, opened a qualified account, etc.). Click the event to see its details.
The status of the event will either be "passing", "suspicious", "approved", "declined". For more information on what each status means, check out our Status Definitions FAQ.
Once you know the status of the event, you will be better able to inform the customer as to the status of their reward whether they were deemed ineligible for self referral, previous customer, etc
If you'd like to honor the reward, you can manually approve or decline the event:
Approve will confirm the event and distribute rewards, if applicable.
Decline will deny the event and distribute no rewards.
If the event was declined and the Approve option is not available, but the reward should be sent to the customer, check How to Manually Create a Referral or other Event.
For more details, see Approving and Declining Events Workflow.
If the event is missing:
Confirm the customer performed the required action
Make sure the corresponding data was sent over to Extole
Check if Extole received the event, but couldn’t attribute it to the referral program. This can happen when the referral is done incorrectly (customer is referred after they did the qualifying action), or the event’s order is not followed (the qualification event is sent before the referral is created).
In such cases, click on Check steps on the person’s profile and search for the rewardable event - it should have no details in the Campaign, Program, and Journey columns. If this is the case, check How to Manually Create a Referral or other Event to create an event within the referral program to reward the customer.
If the checks for 1 and/or 2 have failed, please contact [email protected] for assistance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean if I approve an event but no reward is sent?
To see why an approved event may not have received a reward, you can view:
Event History - One or few of the qualification criteria failed. These are determined by the rules of your program, see more about reward rules here.
Rewards -> View Reward - the reward itself couldn’t be sent due to the lack of funds, or campaign misconfiguration.
Can I retroactively decline an approved event?
If the event was approved, then the rewards have already been sent out, and the associated customer(s) will still receive their rewards.