When I was growing up, my dad loved to rent movies but we were never a Blockbuster family. We always opted to rent from the library, Long’s Drugs or anywhere else that you could rent a movie for $1 or less. Paying $5 to rent a movie and get it for five nights is not an attractive deal to me. If I am going to rent a movie, I’m going to watch it that night. Renting a movie for five nights typically meant I watched it the first night and then forgot to return it on day five and got charged a late fee.
That’s why I LOVE Redbox. Redbox is everywhere and it’s like $1.20 per night and $0.50 more for BluRay. The best part about the Redbox experience is that you can reserve your movie online and check multiple locations to see which machine has the movie. Then you go pick it up when it’s convenient for you.
Friday evening, I reserved “Silver Lining’s Playbook” at my local Redbox but when I went down to pick it up, I found that the machine was out of order. Oops. No wonder it showed as available. I was charged for the rental but had no way of getting the movie. I instead went and rented “Parental Guidance” from another machine which actually turned out to be really funny.
When I got back home I checked online to see if I could cancel my initial order. After finding out that I couldn’t, I found Redbox customer care was open and called them to get my $1.20 back. There are probably better things to do with my Friday night but hey, I write about customer service and this was an opportunity.
After a short wait, a representative answered the phone and her opening line was “Thank you for calling Redbox. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with this evening?” Isn’t that a great line? I’m seriously considering stealing that for our call center. After explaining the situation to her, she said she didn’t have the ability to cancel/refund my order but she could credit me for two free rentals to which I responded “Booyah.” In all, she resolved my issue within a few minutes and when she said “Sorry for any inconvenience this caused” at the end of the call, I responded with “No problem. I love Redbox.”
In review, Redbox uses low prices, convenience and awesome customer service to create a top notch customer experience. All they have to do now is make it so you can’t reserve movies on a machine that’s out of order. That would have prevented my call altogether. Thank you Redbox for your terrific product and outstanding service.
Sincerely,
