I don't have a job title for what I want to do next.

The account came to me the normal way, transferred from the implementation manager once onboarding wrapped. What I found: the main thing this customer wanted the program to do was filter actual loyalty members from everyone else, people who'd joined versus people who'd just logged in to check an order. With this login, there was no separate opt-in step, so there was no way to make that distinction. The loyalty tiers were also set up almost flat, which didn't help, but the filtering was the real problem.

Once I confirmed this was a genuine product limitation, not a configuration mistake, I escalated it as far and as fast as I could. I also went back and listened to the actual sales calls, to check what this customer had been told versus what was actually possible. They'd been promised this filtering, clearly, and it wasn't something our platform could do. Not on the day they signed, and not for a while after.

I told my manager the truth: we'd sold them something that didn't exist yet. So I gave the customer two options, and meant both of them. Start over, tiers fixed, on the beta of the fix, with the contract extended to make up for what they were promised and didn't get. Or we part ways, and I refund the contract.

They chose to start over. I rebuilt the setup myself. It's the only time in four years at Yotpo I offered someone a way out of their contract, because it was the only time the honest answer was that we might deserve to lose them.

The tier structure, for reference

This part is out of the box, standard on any Yotpo loyalty program. Each tier should earn faster than the last:

This customer had it set at 1.0 / 1.1 / 1.2 instead, flat enough that upgrading barely mattered. That was the setup I inherited and fixed.

People noticed I was presenting different slides in my QBRs and started asking about them: what they were, how I was pulling the numbers, how I was analyzing it. I explained it and shared the template when they asked.

Looking back, I don't think I fully realized it at the time, but I'd found a real gap: the way we presented data to customers wasn't detailed enough to actually show them how their program was performing. A program usually has several earning rules and campaigns running at once, a referral bonus here, a birthday bonus there, a seasonal push on top of both. Rolled into one performance number, you can tell whether the program overall is doing well. You can't tell why, or which piece is actually driving it.

So I pulled it apart myself. There wasn't a seamless way to do this. I exported the raw reports, mapped individual purchases back to the specific earning rule or campaign that drove them, then compared across time frames. If there was a site-wide sale with no new campaign running, I could isolate how much of the lift was the sale and how much was the program. If a new earning rule launched outside of a sale, the same logic worked in reverse.

The part that's less tidy

Any time I handed off an account to a teammate, I put real effort into it. Direct links to the account's key stakeholders on LinkedIn, so whoever took it over could see who they were dealing with. Who I talked to most. What actually mattered on the account, beyond what was in the CRM. I did that because I know what it's like to receive the opposite: a one-line note that costs someone weeks of digging through old tickets to understand where an account stands. That's exactly what happened at the start of the last case.

I raised it with my manager, that our handoffs were inconsistent and it was costing real time. It didn't go anywhere. I think it read as a complaint about one bad handoff instead of a proposal for a fixed process.

I still think it's a real gap. A standard handoff template is a small thing to build and an easy thing to measure. I just never had the mandate to actually own it.