I have been a Gamefly customer for well over a year. It's a great service, it offers great rental and purchase deals that are crushing their competition, and they provide one of the best user reviews of games I've ever read. Their deals are far better than anything I see at Gamestop, Best Buy, and BLockbuster Video.
And, I will continue to use them, even though I'm about to share with you the stupidest customer service incident I have ever encountered in my days of being a smart consumer.
As everyone knows, around April 19th, the Playstation network crashed and burned. It did not get back up and running until late May.
Gamefly has a 30 day return policy for all game purchases. In most cases, that's very reasonable.
But put that 30 day trial period with the PSN hacker crash. If the game you purchased at that time is one of the unlucky few that would not download updates - or if you bought the game just for multiplayer use - then there is no way you can try out the game within the 30 day time frame. There are many games where a defect does not surface on the very first day of playing.
So, to put this into real world text, as Shazoo and Macrocephalus can vouch for on the "Bad Nights in Bad Company 2" thread, I needed a replacement PS3 copy for Bad Company 2. I got my copy just in time for the PSN hacker attack, and we could not play it until nearly a month later.
Well, as you can see on the thread, I was having issues the moment I started playing. I first thought that the EA servers were going to crap, but as I found out Monday night, my disc was the real culprit.
So, I do what any avid consumer would do. I try to contact Gamefly Support to see if they will exchange the game for me. A great company like Gamefly would do this, right? Gamestop does it on a blink. Best Buy will do it most of the time (and all of the time if you act like a jerk and demand to talk to a supervisor.) And yes, Blockbuster will do it and sometimes even give you extra days on your rental.
What does Gamefly do? They bombard you with surveys!
After giving them my venomous bad review on their survey, I get this email reply.
| Subject | |
| Last month, I purchased a PS3 copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from Gamefly. B... | |
| Discussion Thread | |
| Response (James B) | 05/31/2011 11:46 AM |
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Hello, Thank you for contacting GameFly. We apologize that the game Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is not working properly. Unfortunately per Terms of Use all sales are final after 30 days. If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. Sincerely, James B. The GameFly Team Email: support@gamefly.com Online help: http://www.gamefly.com/help |
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| Auto-Response | 05/30/2011 10:21 PM |
| Suggested Answers Displayed |
Now I wonder if I was too harsh on the survey? Should I have wined and dined them on that survey, in order to get my game exchanged?
Truthfully, if I knew this was going to happen (and my jaw is still sore from how far it dropped on this surprisingly lack of good customer service from such a respectable business) I would have quoted Al Pacino from the climatic scene of "Scent of a Woman." (for those who never saw that movie, it involves a flamethrower.)
So, Gamefly dropped the ball. Now before I do anything else drastic, I decided to leave my flamethrower at home, and follow the path of the avid consumer. I think I will, just for the sake of blogging, and maybe even have something great to discuss on the Clark Howard website, I'm gonna see exactly how far Electronic Arts and Sony will go to make customers happy during this period of PSN recovery. Feel free post your speculations of what the outcome of this will be, for after my Gamefly dealings, all bets are off on how this will end.