Today was the day that the new PC Optimum rewards program was supposed to launch. The program takes the old PC Plus rewards program that grocery store Loblaw used, and the Shoppers Optimum program that pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart used, and merge them in to one program seeing as both retailers are owned by the same company. The process to sign up for this new program was billed as being seamless, and there was a new app on offer to make it easy to track rewards and earn points, but apparently both assertions by the company have entered #fail country:
I can verify that my experience transitioning over to the new program was sub optimal. The app tends to crash, as well as not display information correctly. Plus my sign up experience wasn’t great as it took a few tries before it worked. Clearly there are issues to iron out and I would recommend that they need to do this quickly as PC Optimum is trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons and it’s getting the attention of the media. And that’s bad press that this company cannot afford.
UPDATE: If you’re running the iOS version of the PC Optimum app, you should check for an update that appears to solve the crash problems and other issues that I wrote about.
UPDATE #2: The #fail continues. My wife registered for PC Optimum and it was a frustrating experience for her that left her repeatedly saying “I hate Loblaws.” And during that process, she found another bug in the PC Optimum app for iOS. Location services doesn’t work properly. When she tried to use it to find the nearest store, this is what she consistently got:
I tried the same exercise on my iPhone 7 Plus and it only worked for me about six out of ten times. Where in her case, it worked zero out of ten times on her iPhone 6. Either way, it is becoming clear that those behind this PC Optimum rollout didn’t have all their ducks in a row prior to rolling this out.
UPDATE #3: A update to the iOS app was pushed out on Sunday to fix the bug that my wife found. We also leveraged the “household” function to pool our points together to get a free week’s worth of groceries. That made my wife forget about some of the frustration to get to this point. Though, that two was a frustrating experience as it took almost an hour for us to set up that function as you need to invite people to join your household and it takes that long for the invitation to arrive by email. But once you accept the invitation, the confirmation is instant. Why that makes sense I have have no idea.
#Fail: PC Optimum Launch Plagued With Problems
Posted in Commentary with tags PC Optimum on February 1, 2018 by itnerdToday was the day that the new PC Optimum rewards program was supposed to launch. The program takes the old PC Plus rewards program that grocery store Loblaw used, and the Shoppers Optimum program that pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart used, and merge them in to one program seeing as both retailers are owned by the same company. The process to sign up for this new program was billed as being seamless, and there was a new app on offer to make it easy to track rewards and earn points, but apparently both assertions by the company have entered #fail country:
I can verify that my experience transitioning over to the new program was sub optimal. The app tends to crash, as well as not display information correctly. Plus my sign up experience wasn’t great as it took a few tries before it worked. Clearly there are issues to iron out and I would recommend that they need to do this quickly as PC Optimum is trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons and it’s getting the attention of the media. And that’s bad press that this company cannot afford.
UPDATE: If you’re running the iOS version of the PC Optimum app, you should check for an update that appears to solve the crash problems and other issues that I wrote about.
UPDATE #2: The #fail continues. My wife registered for PC Optimum and it was a frustrating experience for her that left her repeatedly saying “I hate Loblaws.” And during that process, she found another bug in the PC Optimum app for iOS. Location services doesn’t work properly. When she tried to use it to find the nearest store, this is what she consistently got:
I tried the same exercise on my iPhone 7 Plus and it only worked for me about six out of ten times. Where in her case, it worked zero out of ten times on her iPhone 6. Either way, it is becoming clear that those behind this PC Optimum rollout didn’t have all their ducks in a row prior to rolling this out.
UPDATE #3: A update to the iOS app was pushed out on Sunday to fix the bug that my wife found. We also leveraged the “household” function to pool our points together to get a free week’s worth of groceries. That made my wife forget about some of the frustration to get to this point. Though, that two was a frustrating experience as it took almost an hour for us to set up that function as you need to invite people to join your household and it takes that long for the invitation to arrive by email. But once you accept the invitation, the confirmation is instant. Why that makes sense I have have no idea.
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