Background

I imagine many of you will have been tempted to start a free LoveFilm trial. For whatever reason, when the trial comes to an end you may decide not to start paying for membership. At that point, you would think all you need to do is log in to your account and click a big “Cancel” button. Sadly, with LoveFilm that is not the case. According to their Help Centre article, LoveFilm expect you to make a phone call of around 4 minutes to their call centre to “provide feedback” and cancel your account. The word in the forums is that this involves persuading their customer retention representative that you really really really do want to cancel, and that you’re really really not interested in any special offers or cheaper packages.

In my opinion, any service which you sign up for online and use exclusively online (e.g. LoveFilm Instant) should be possible to cancel online too, especially when there’s no contract and the provider makes a point of saying you can cancel at any time. Any company which forces you to jump through hoops to escape after a trial period, no matter how easy it may be, is effectively trying to retain customers by making it awkward to leave. It would be better if they invested that time and effort in improving the quality of their service, and then had the confidence to let customers decide to stay of their own accord.

How To Cancel Online

Now I really don’t like speaking to call centres if I can avoid it, so I did some research and discovered that in fact it is still possible to cancel your LoveFilm account online, but only if you do this when their call centre is closed (I believe this is between midnight and 8am). If you visit your My Account page and click the Cancel link, you can answer a few questions and cancel without speaking to anyone. This solution worked for me yesterday (August 6th 2012). Fantastic!

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