I was interested in Seventymm from a long time(ever since my NetFlix experience in US) and right after coming to Bangalore I was trying to decide whether to go with Seventymm or Bigflix. Started to register with Seventymm(the plans look similar, but Seventymm has a annoying ‘registration fee’ of Rs 199). I completed my first step in registration and was in two minds whether to proceed. I preferred Seventymm since it was a startup competing with the big guy. But I hated the registration fee.
Guess what? Within 15 minutes I got a call from Seventymm and a marketing guy offered me a registration fee waiver!. So far so good.
I started using their service. Their stock is OK, but not great. Very rarely did I get my top choice in my queue. However, they always managed to ship something from my queue( I always maintained more than 15 movies in my queue, and I guess 4-5 movies were almost always available among them)
Now, the problems: One fine morning, I saw a movie was shipped to me, even though I never ordered a new movie. As soon as I got the SMS(of a new movie getting shipped) I called customer service. “No worries sir, we shall cancel the request” was the answer. Well, the delivery boy still came with my movie. My wife sent him back, since we did not yet finish seeing the other movie. Well, next day he is back again. This time he said “you take the movie madam, and return both movies together”. So, now we have two movies with us(even though the plan is of one movie).
Now the problem starts. I repeatedly ask them to pick up my movies. Call customer service. Nothing happens. If I call customer service in morning, they say “It will be picked up today”. Call them in the afternoon “It will be picked up tomorrow”. It went on for about 1 week, when I said enough is enough, please cancel my account.
That transferred the case to their “retention department” and my problem got solved like magic!
This kind of issues happened every now and then for me. If something goes wrong, their service really sucks.
Finally, I had a new baby and disconnected my service. At that time I received 3 separate calls from their “retention department”, and after some struggle got my deposit back about 2 months after my cancellation.
Overall, here is what I think of them
Stock: Nod great, but good enough
Marketing: Very sharp and active
Service: This is bad. The worst part I think, is that unlike others, they do NOT have a concept of
"complaint number”. Thus, for every issue, each call/email of yours is a ‘new call’. You are forced to repeat your story over and over again. Also, they have no concept of closing a complaint. As soon as the service person keeps his phone down, you are at his/her mercy regarding follow up. Also, their regular customer service and operations(delivery department) seem to have little coordination. Nobody tracks a complaint to conclusion. ONLY customer service that works is if you threaten to quit. Then they forward you call to a different department and that works.
- Closing account & ‘retention department’: Chances are, you shall face these people quite often, because they are the only effective customer service that Seventymm has. These guys have the necessary power and incentive to solve your issues. If you really want to close your account, you shall immediately notice that this department too suffers from the malice of lack of complaint number and availability of customer history. When I tried to close my account, I received three separate calls from this department in approximately 1 week gap, each one having NO CLUE of what I talked to the other. My last movie was finally picked up about 4 weeks after my cancellation request, and I received my deposit check around 4 weeks after that.
*Advice to prospective seventymm customers:** You can go ahead with severntymm, especially if you believe in helping the minnow fighting the shark(Bigflix). However, I would strongly advice you against going for any other plan except for the monthly renewal. If you do that, you shall lose the only good customer service weapon: Threat to quit.
*Advice to Seventymm:** Yours is a nice effort. You are the pioneer in Netflix type idea in India. Please keep it up. However, please improve your customer service and coordination between customer service and operations. By the way, my account number was 104545, but from what I understood of your infrastructure, you won’t be able to dig out much history from that J Good Luck. Keep up the startup spirit and give BigFlix a good fight!