Bing Rewards - My first Amazon gift card redemption

For the people staying in USA, Bing has been offering an 'incentive' to jump ship :)

http://www.bing.com/rewards/dashboard

The program is quite reasonable and within two months I became a gold member (where you can get bragging rights, and 15% discount for gift redemption) and also withdrawn USD 10 Amazon gift cards (2x5).

This is something with minimal effort. I've changed the default search engine to Google in my firefox and that's all I did. For every 2 searches, the user gets 1x point. Also, time to time BING creates some offers where users can get more points. Or referring friends, and get 200 points when they reach silver status.

Not a bad idea to use BING too. Especially I like their homepage pictures and it is kind of refreshing at times.

SingTel Rewards - New program launch. Basically it's removing their loyalty program

You might have observed the changes to SingTel Red rewards, through their website or SMS push.

Come August 2013, you can look forward to a fresh new rewards programme. In the new programme, you can enjoy a variety of exciting lifestyle treats that would appeal to everyone in your family, every month. This is our way of thanking you for being with SingTel. Look out for more details at www.singtel.com/red.

Now, the so called "new programme" is nothing but removal of their existing program and saying that you guys suck for being SingTel "loyal" customers. On the other hand their CEO-Consumer and their Optus MD seems to have focusing on "Customer retention" and NPS which means giving more value to loyalty. Also during their conf call in August, they stated clearly loyalty is important and it costs more to get a new customer than retaining one.

However the 'walk' seems to be totally diff to the 'talk'. So now SingTel expects you to chalk-up bills worth 250 every month to quality for their 'elite loyalty' program. Rest of the bunch are just a losers. So if you are spending 200 every month then you are not a good customer in their eyes and doesn't warrant any loyalty bonus.

It's no wonder as SingTel loyalty program was the worst five years ago with their red rewards program. Also they don't even bother to "keep" you as their customer after your contract. They simply charge "existing price rate" and force you to sign up new contract.

If you look at StarHub or M1, they are no saints but atleast I've received mailers, e-mails and calls when my contract is about to expire. StarHub even sent me a voucher to use it in their store. that's a good gesture.

So now I am using SingTel only for my mobile and chalking up bills averaging 150 for the last three months. Now it's high time for me to go back to M1 or SH and enjoy some bundling promo. 

Times Points - TOI or Times Of India new reward scheme

Source: here

Below the FAQ copied from website. It is a good and somewhat different idea to bring traffic to website. I am sure there is significant difference as based on number of comments posted and the not bad points.

So the idea goes like this.

• When you visit an article you'll get 1 point. 
• For comment 5 points. 
• When someone likes or recommends another 1 or 2 points. 
• Facebook or Twitter share will get 5 points for each share

So if you post average 20 comments a day you may get 150 points (assuming 20x1 for visit + 20x5 for comment + average 1.5 likes or recommend). So in a month you'll get 4500 points and you can redeem gifts. For example Adidas 3x deo is worth ~5200 points. In the market it's going for ~500. So approximately 1 poitn is 10paisa or 10 points = 1INR.

Not a bad deel as it can pay for your broadband bill :)

But the downside is the system is very buggy. Many a times, you'll see the points are not getting updated, your login is not loading, or the system asking you to confirm email address multiple times etc.

Still worth a try if you spend lots of time reading news. By the way one tip is make sure you've adblock installed on your firefox/chrome. Their model is simply based on ad prints or ad revenue so the site is filled with ads. 

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