Nothing Like Some Good Old Fashioned Bad Customer Service To Make Your Day

I have a problem with Netflix. (I also have a problem with my shift key in that the left one fell off and every time I try to use the right one I hit enter but that is unrelated except in the fact that I published this entry 5 times whie still typing it). Anyway - Netflix is great - I love getting my movies in the mail, and don't really ever have an issue with planning in advance to watch movies rather than being able to go directly to the store and rent one. And since my subscription is always given to me as a gift, it is basically free to me which is great too (thanks Rees and Jen). However, they have some issues with how their gift redemption works. First of all, you can't redeem a new gift subscription while you are still using an old one - you have to wait until the old one is over. Technically you are supposed to be able to apply the new one within the final month, but that fails to work either. So you are left with the option of waiting until your subscription runs out and your credit card gets charged for one month so you can redeem the new gift subscription (which is how over the years I have ended up not being able to use my Christmas gift until May), or you can check back every day and hope that it finally gets accepted. That was the method I chose to utilize this year, and let me tell you how it went. After checking every day for a few weeks, I finally got an email from Netflix telling me the exact date my subscription would end (so now I can just wait for that email every year - yay). I tried on the day it ended - nothing. I tried first thing in the morning the day after it ended - and not only did it not work, but they had already charged my card. Pissed. Then - I learned another ridiculous fact about Netflix - they have no email communication. That's right folks, a company that is completely web based does not have a customer service contact email. Wicked awesome, right? So I had to call them about this issue, which thankfully was fixed right away. However, in order to refund my card the only way they had to fix it was to cancel my account and then just immediately reinstate it with the gift subscription. This seems like poor planning to me, but I said okay because the woman assured me that nothing would actually change on my account. Well, she was either stupid or a liar, because, as you might expect when an account is cancelled, so are all of the movies saved in the queue. Super pissed. So now I have to try and remember all of the random movies I once thought sounded good and put onto my list - which let me tell you is not my forte. It sometimes takes me weeks to remember new movies to put on there despite seeing ads for them several times a dayand reading Entertainment Weekly, weekly. So I am pretty disappointed with Netflix - not enough to stop using them just yet, but enough to hope that millions of people somehow read this and boycott, forcing them to rethink the ineptitude of their customer service. They should take a note from one of my favorite shopping websites, Zappos, which says right on its home page that it is a service company that just happens to sell shoes, bags, clothes, etc. Clearly, Netflix is a movie company that is trying its best to ignore the fact that it is on the web.