Netflix Service Tips

I had the weirdest phone call with Netflix customer support.  If you aren't in the know, Netflix replaced their e-mail customer support with honest to goodness humans.  I'm not sure why, because I never had a problem with their e-mail support.  I had to use the phone support today and it was pretty good, right up until the human answered the phone... 

We've never really been throttled but cracked discs are a bump in the road when walking with Netflix.  You get one, you report it, they send you another one immediately.  Not a huge deal until you get 3 or 4 in a month.  At one point we even experienced a cracked replacement disc. That tore it so I wrote to Netflix saying we'd received a bunch of broken discs lately and I thought it was silly for the money we've been paying ($17/month = $204/year over 3 years).  The response back was that they were sorry and broken discs happen.  However, they gave my son's profile two bonus discs, which when you use them, fire off the first item in your queue immediately.  I wrote back saying that I appreciated the gesture but asked if they could remove the discs from his profile and add them to my profile.  Again, they apologized saying the discs couldn't be moved and they just gave my account 2 more instead of saying something like, "Tough crap".  Wow. 

Pretty nice, huh?  This time, however, I was expecting Disc #3 from the Cosmos series I mentioned below.  I looked at the disc immediately (see below) when I found it in our mail yesterday and saw "Disc 3" and no cracks.  Later that night, I popped it in the DVD player and its menu displayed episodes 6 and 7.  The last DVD I watched finished with episode 3.  Knowing that something was amiss, I found two sources to confirm my suspicions that Disc #3 should contain episodes 4 and 5. 

I immediately went to Netflix.com and reported the disc as mislabeled.  To my surprise, the page didn't say it would send me a replacement and said to re-add the correct disc to my queue.  This was impossible as that disc was already at the top of my queue.  My wife said to simply return the disc and wait for them to send another copy.  This would be unlikely as they could receive my disc 3 and send me disc 4, which I already had, before I could re-add disc 3 to the top.  You might think it but I don't check my e-mail every 5 minutes.  The end result would be me pissing away a week and a half without the DVD I wanted. 

I called Netflix just now and told them all this.  The guy who helped me was a stone wall as far as helping me get the disc I wanted.  He said I should try to do what my wife said to which I made the case against it.  I said, since he couldn't add it to my queue, he could put it at the top of my wife's queue and send it immediately.  He said I'd have to wait until my wife watched her movie before it went out.  Stupid.  I told him about the bonus discs and how generous Netflix had been in the past.  He seemed unflinched.  I then made the case that this was no different than if the DVD was cracked.  To me, the disc is unwatchable.  Even if he sent the correct disc, it wouldn't be like I screwed him over since I wouldn't receive a new disc until I had watched and returned both of the ones I had.  I get my disc, they get to be the hero and we're all happy.  The stone wall didn't budge. 

So I finally put it this way: "If I were to flat out lie and report the disc as broken you'd send me a replacment, correct?" He says, "Yes." I say, "So, you're telling me that if this happens again, I should lie to get a the movie I actually wanted?" He says, "Yes." My jaw hits the floor.  While he's chattering away about something, I went into my queue and re-reported the disc as broken.  I said to him that I had changed my mind and that the disc is broken and I want a replacement.  He said he'd make it happen.  How stupid is that??? 

Anyway, here's my list of Netflix Service Tips:

1. Check your DVDs immediately on arrival. This will prevent you from opening the DVD two days later and discovering it's in two pieces just as your popcorn is popped.  Send it back and save some time!
2. Lie. If you have the wrong DVD, report it broken and you'll get a replacement.  Report it as mislabeled and I guess you're on your own.

That last one really hurts because we've been with Netflix for about 3 years or so.  We've even fended off the Blockbuster staff when renting Wii games with remarks like, "We're really happy with Netflix." Anyway, my rant's over and I should get to work!