GeorgefromLightbox: Here at Lightbox, we’re keen to hear about what you think of our service, and listen to suggestions and issues you may have.

Hi @GeorgefromLightbox, in keeping with the above opening line in the forum sticky I thought I'd post a suggestion about customer service: don't pay lip-service to it or give out answers which try to pretend you're interested in problems.

I thought I'd also post a suggestion about payment options: increase them from the single option you have now. For instance if you had a PayPal gateway I wouldn't have had any issues.

I recently canned my Air New Zealand OneSmart card as it no longer has the overseas usage benefits it once did. That leaves me with a MasterCard Debit Card from my Credit Union which works nicely for all my overseas transactions and with streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. It even worked to pay for my Lightbox subscription back in February just after I canned the other card. It didn't work in March though and emails to Lightbox have produced a series of 'sympathetic' responses with no real answer and absolutely no interest in having the particular (and peculiar) problem looked into.

Initially a CSR at my Credit Union said the card issuers needed to supply a 4 digit code to Lightbox so that requests for payment could be validated. She said until the card provider did this the payments wouldn't work. Not knowing a thing about banking or the behind the scenes operations of MasterCard I wasn't really in a position to challenge this outside of saying "that doesn't make sense as it's worked before". A few days later a Credit Union employee called up and said he'd looked at the Lightbox requests and they weren't sending the expiry date of the card so couldn't be validated. Lightbox CSR's were advised of this and gave a simple response of "it doesn't happen to other customers" which is undoubtedly true but not at all helpful as it is happening to me. A common theme was also repeated - use another card. I don't have another card and have mentioned this a few times. 

A few days later I got another email from them asking if I'd received the previous email. "Yes I have" I wrote back. I advised (politely) I didn't think they were being particularly helpful and as payments to other providers worked I'd be happy to forego the Lightbox service. I've got to admit, their response did make me laugh - zero attempt to convince me to stay, just an email with instructions on how to cancel my subscription. Please thank the CSR's for me for the pat answers, and the absolute disinterest in looking into and trying to resolve this problem.