Blockbuster Video advertisements are promoting "Total Access." According to the ads and the company's website, if you have an online delivery membership you can return your movies by mail in the nifty envelope they provide or if you don't want to wait for the Postal Service to deliver your next movie, you can take the DVD to your local store and exchange it for a new movie instantly.
With Thanksgiving Holiday weekend upon us and a desire for movies, today I exercised the "drop it off at the store" option for the first time.
When checking out, I had the chance to be waited on by the manager of the store and she was delightful. I had one question for her: Now that I've turned in my movie and received another one immediately, does my online list wait until the newly received movie ("exchanged movie") is returned or do they just mail out the next movie on my list immediately?
"I've heard conflicting answers to that," the manager told me.
That's scary I thought... especially since you're the manager and the company is in the middle of what must be a multi-million dollar ad campaign to roll out this new service!
The manager explained that she had received conflicting reports from upper management on this question - some saying the next online delivery movie would go out immediately - others saying that it wouldn't happen until I returned the "exchanged movie" back to the store.
She did ask me to let her know (if I didn't mind) how it worked out for me personally so that she would have the answer when future customers asked.
If your own management team doesn't know how your newest program offering works, you have a BIG problem.
A great amount of time and money is spent on developing a program, creating the marketing materials, and building the IT infrastructure to handle a major change in logistics like this. But Blockbuster forgot to explain it to their own people. Oops.
I will say that her request for my input made me feel like we were "in it together" and I plan to let her know what happens when I received my next movie.
This results in an interesting twist to what could have been a bad customer experience... By requesting my help, the manager sympathized with my confusion about the program and set up a dynamic whereby I would find the solution and help her by sharing it. Kudos to the manager for taking this approach instead of just saying, "I don't know" or expressing anger at the lack of information management was providing about the program.
Somewhere at Blockbuster, they know what is going to happen to the movie I returned - now only if the manager and I had the same knowledge...
