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.
Lord Howe Island, 2009
Blockbusting?
If you were running a video or dvd rental store, and you were aware of the rise of NetFlix and it’s bretheren, what would you be doing now to save your business?
Would you be conceding defeat? Time to pack it in and lease the shop out to another mobile phone seller?
Here’s what I might consider:
- Let my customers browse online to see what is actually on the shelves for borrowing right now, like I can with public libraries. I’m sure some stores already do this, but I haven’t seen them.
- Work out a way of letting customers in-store look up all the reviews on the web so they don’t end up with a crappy movie they hate.
- Setup special deals that tie in with well publicised lists like 100 greatest movies. Make it easy for people to watch all those movies, and make it cheaper too.
- Be smarter about recommending movies to people, send emails about movies they might not have heard of, but match viewing patterns
- Reward people for being loyal, with something better than $2 off a rental. It should be something they can’t easily get elsewhere. Movie memorabilia maybe.
What would you do?
“The Cam”, Cambridge 2005
In which I list the significant events that have occurred since I first got orthodontic braces
- I have lived in Cambridge, UK
- Moved back to Sydney
- Contracted for a few years
- Spoken at a web conference in New York
- Become a father
- Joined Campaign Monitor
- Celebrated my 10th anniversary
- Moved south out of Sydney
It’s been nearly 5 years, and there are a lot of people in my life who have never seen me sans-jaws-teeth. Next week they come off.
