Me

My photo
www.natashapage.com for me, art and photography.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Cancelling LoveFilm

I’ve been with lovefilm for about a year and I don’t use the service – my last dvd had been sitting around on a shelf for about 3 months, so I thought – there’s no point in shelling out every month for something I never use. So on to LoveFilm I went, thinking it’d just be a case of clicking a button and closing my account. Not so. In the ‘account’ section there was indeed a button to press to say ‘cancel my account’. I’m a total phonophone- I detest making phonecalls, so if I have to deal with things, I’d rather press a few buttons, shoot off an email or get on a bus (in that order) even when I’m ill I’d sooner drag my sickly arse out of bed and walk 10 mins to the doctors to make an appointment than phone up. I know. It’s weird, but that’s just the way I am.

ANYWAY. So I pressed cancel, naively thinking it would take me to an ‘are you sure you want to cancel your account with us? yes/no’ page where I’d click a button and that would be it sorted. No, the next page was with a number saying that I had to call up to confirm my cancellation, and I seem to remember that number being a premium one. So.. as there doesn’t seem to be any way around it, I called, and it took me to some indian call centre where the woman on the other end of the phone was doing everything she could to make me stay – offering to downgrade my account (which was already the lowest) and giving me a free month. I don’t want ANY month! I WANT TO CLOSE MY ACCOUNT!!

I realise call centres do a fair amount of good generating jobs in poorer countries, but I’m sorry, I have better things to do with my life and my money than sit around having a chat to some random woman in India and paying through the nose for it and in the end not coming away with what I wanted. I had to settle for the free month for two reasons.

One, I stuck my disk in the post that day. Appaently they had already got it and had sent out another disk (though how they could have received my disk already is beyond me) and that she’d give me a free month while I get THAT disk and send it back, and then Id have to call again.

So basically the deal is like this: They won’t put a black mark against my name so when they get the disk back it cancels the account automatically so I don’t have to ring up. They won’t cancel my account while I still have some disks and until the disk is returned the account remains active.. yet the second a disk has been returned, they’ve automatically dispatched the next one. Which, in my opinion is utterly ridiculous.

Browsing around on some forums and such to see if anyone else has encountered these problems, it seems I am not alone. Seriously, just type ‘cancel love film problem’ into Google and see just HOW MANY angry people there are out there.

Here are just a couple of examples:

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/lovefilm-com/1028646/

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1063656

http://www.wordsgofurther.com/user-experience/want-to-cancel-your-lovefilm-subscription-good-luck

 

Apparently there is a button to press to cancel the subscription without needing to call up, which mysteriously appears to a select few between the hours of 10pm and 5am and then vanishes again. Yeah. Fat lot of use. And there is another one which has been very cleverly hidden, but a kind user on one of the forums had posted up a direct link, which is the one I used today.

https://www.lovefilm.com/account/cancel_confirm.html

I’ve got a mark on my account and a confirmation email from them which seems promising so I’ll let you know how it goes!

lovefilm1

lovefilm2

In the mean time, this is what I’ve done to help myself out a bit:

1. Made a note of the day which I’m supposed to be billed next, In my case it’s the 26th so they have PLENTY of time to receive my DVD back and cancel my account. Also means that I know exactly when to check my account. Apparently they’re sneaky about it and once you cancel, they don’t appear on your bill as ‘lovefilm’ but just as a generic payment. I’ve also made my bank aware of the situation and I’ve got the number of my card company so if necessary, I can call them up and get them to block those transactions. Hopefully I won’t need to.

2. On my lovefilm account, I’ve gone into my list of dvds pending and totally wiped it. If they don’t know what’s next on my list, they can’t send me anything! See my logic there, eh?

3. When I posted my DVD I got my post office to give me a proof of postage certificate, so if they try and say ‘oh we never got your DVD’ I can say ‘well I sent it and here’s the proof.. suck on that’.

 

Hope these links etc help some of you guys out if you’re having the same problem – if you’re considering going with lovefilm, do so at your own risk. I’ve had no problems with them sending me things- that’s been fine but this cancellation process and the insult of having to pay a premium number to get put through to an Indian call centre and not even have my account cancelled at the end of it and basically jumping through hoops for something so simple has really put my nose out of joint and I can safely say I won’t be going back to them purely because of that. I may well be making a mountain out of a molehill, but when I’m paying for something I have got very little patience when it comes to people trying to screw me around.

No comments: