Archive of March 2010
Tim Tams and Boomerangs in Austin
“Well you don’t sound Australian!”
For the benefit of the rest of the world: Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin do not represent the typical Australian accent. I spent last week in Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive conference with roughly 4,000 other geeks, disappointing them with my lack of Aussie-ness.
Fortunately my fellow Campaign Monitor team member Ros shipped in a ton of Tim Tams and boomerangs so we managed to maintain our citizenships. The Campaign Monitor trip to Texas set out to meet a few goals:
- Catch up with existing customers and remote Campaign Monitor team members
- Talk to web designers about Campaign Monitor
- Learn everything we could from the speakers and attendees
I’d say we can give ourselves three big ticks, now that we’re back in Australia (and Portland, Calgary and Norway for the other guys). SXSW must be the highest concentration of web designers on the planet, so dense it is a serious risk of becoming a kind of nerd blackhole that sucks all the bandwidth right out of existence. My highlights of the trip include seeing Dan Roam and Gary Vaynerchuk speaking, chatting with Sarah Hatter (that’s Sarah with an ‘h’!) and eating a truly incredible amount of meat.
We also met and talked to the people who are our ‘competitors’ in the email marketing industry and found them all friendly and helpful, and surprisingly willing to wear our shirts. There might even be some community building coming out of those chats, which would be exciting.
Thank you Austin for your hospitality, your obsession with fluorescent cheese and your constant offers of convenient tattooing. I hope to see you again next year.
Quick fix for Quickflix
I recently wrote about how physical ‘video’ stores are on sinking ground, being replaced by either cheap and fast enough DVD by mail services or by digital content from legal or illegal sources.
For the past few years at the patto household we’ve been using Quickflix, an Australian copy of Netflix. I really enjoyed it – the website worked well, DVDs always arrived on time and it was generally hassle free and a much better alternative to Blockbuster.
This year with jrpatto around and significantly less time to watch movies we decided to cut the small Quickflix fee out of the budget, to be replaced with free TV on time delay, and the occasional iTunes rental or purchase. So I jumped onto the website to cancel my account.
Quickflix is a service that is totally online based. You signup online, manage your queue online and change your payment and address details online. I’d never had to call anyone or even email their customer service team. I didn’t know if they even had a phone number, and I’d never needed to find out. Which is fine by me.
Signing in, I visited the ‘My account’ section – perfect!
Actually, no you can’t
Despite what the page clearly promises, you can’t actually cancel your account. They give you a phone number that you have to call. Why is that? Obviously this is not a technical constraint, since the entire business is run online and they didn’t need me to call to start charging me money and providing a service.
It’s a blatant marketing ploy to try to keep a customer. Which is fine, but why not just say on the previous page “to cancel your account, please call 1234 5678”. Having the link which looks like you can cancel and then telling you that you can’t is just irritating. It takes away from the fantastic experience I had up to that point.
At Campaign Monitor we get lots of designers doing the email marketing equivalent, by trying to make it super hard to unsubscribe. Hiding the link, making it tiny, wording it oddly. Of course none of it works, and the best case result is people just delete your emails. Worst case, they complain about you as a spammer.
When I complained on twitter to @quickflix they first told me “We ask you to call to cancel so that we can help you with any issues you may be experiencing and to ensure all DVDs are returned“. Which they obviously are incapable of doing on a website? Poor excuse.
They followed up with “We have found that the rate of DVD returns following cancellation has increased since communicating this via telephone.”. Possibly this is true, but even so, they already have my credit card details. If I don’t return the DVDs, just charge me for another month.
Quickflix could and should have just made it super easy for me to cancel, and said ‘please return your outstanding DVDs. As soon as we have them, we’ll close your account, but you are welcome back any time.’ I’d leave happy, and I’d recommend them to anyone. Even if they’d responded on twitter with “Yes, we like to speak to people in case we can offer them a better deal” I’d be fine with that.
Pretending they have to do this via phone is just crap. As it turns out, they won’t let you remove your card details from the account settings, presumably to stop you cancelling in that way, but they do let you update your card expiry date.
So I changed my expiry date to an invalid one, and after sending email warnings they somehow found the ability to cancel my account after 60 days without a single phone call. They also have a lovely message in my account letting me know to return DVDs within 7 days to avoid charges.
See Quickflix, it isn’t that hard after all.
