Customer Service Update – LOVEFiLM and PlusNet
I’ve written several times before about LOVEFiLM and their deteriorating customer service. They’ve just got worse – sometime during or after the merger with Screenselect, it seems that they sneaked in a change – you can now only ‘go on holiday’ (pause the service) for a maximum of 4 weeks a year, and only 2 weeks at a time (with a holiday size measured in units of 1 week). No doubt this is within the T&Cs, but this clearly isn’t going to suit lots of people (myself included), and is just another ill-considered attempt to shave costs (maintaining your account details is essentially zero cost). The only thing that’s keeping me clinging on to LOVEFiLM is their range (the delivery times aren’t getting any better), so I suspect I’ll be ditching them soon. Unless of course they feel like improving? Guys? Hello?
PlusNet, who also failed on the customer service front a while ago when they failed to fix my broadband for almost two weeks, have just published some fairly detailed statistics on their claimed improvement in problem turnaround time. Whether they are true is difficult to say, but it’s certainly interesting to see them being so open for once.
Update 2006-12-23: Some people still don’t like PlusNet much though.
Correction 2007-01-05: You can suspend your account for longer than two weeks, but LOVEFiLM charge £1/week for this – plain cheek, since the cost to them is obviously next to nothing.
I am in the same boat. Since Screenselect and Lovefilm became one I have gotten thoroughly annoyed with the delivery times. I am at the stage now when I am trying to cancel the account… to do that you have to wait for some fool to answer the phone. They are too stupid to allow a simple ‘cancel account’ button on their website… the one they do have just gives a phone number. Unfortunately I do not know of a better online dvd service and so am going to have to be empty handed. Why did the people at Screenselect allow this to happen. Its taken me a month to watch the first season of 24 because of their slooooowww turnaround times.
Jonathan Little
2 Jan 07 at 16:01:31
[...] I’ve written many times before about the poor quality customer service I’ve received from LOVEFiLM, the UK’s largest DVD rental service, and those posts have solicited a lot of complaints from other people too. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my account: a combination of frustration with poor delivery times, them never sending me the titles high on my list, and that they won’t allow me to freely suspend my account for a reasonable amount of time. It’s sad, as they used to provide excellent customer service when I first used them a few years ago (when they were small), but acquisitions and growth seem to have made them fat and lazy, and they no longer treat customers with respect – written examples are all over their website, including the veiled threats of continued charges in the cancellation process itself. [...]
Andrew Ferrier’s Blog » Blog Archive » Cancelled LOVEFiLM
21 Jan 07 at 21:01:20
Even after you cancel, you cant stop their emails and postal mails. Last time I tried to cancel (after searching everywhere for a way to cancel that actually worked) I got a reply that started “Dear Mohammed” and was filled with half sentences…. the best part is thats not even my name.
My real name still gets plenty of junk mail.
Lovefilm is rubbish
7 May 07 at 20:05:08