No DVDs != End of the World

So Netflix had a bit of an outage last week which stopped shipping for many customers for the majority of the week. Although apparently it did affect me, as I’d sent a DVD back on Monday and received its replacement a whopping one day late, I didn’t really think much of it until I saw an article in the paper that I thought was a bit harsh on the actual situation.

I then took a trip over to the Netflix Blog to see what the situation really was, and after spending entirely too much time reading comments, I finally just got pissed off and had to call it a day. It just blows my mind how a company could seemingly do just about everything that we could hope a company could do when they make a mistake – notify its customers (via e-mail, blog, and on the Netflix website itself!), keep those notifications coming daily until the issue is resolved, and then even proactively issue credits to anyone who was affected by the issue! I don’t know what I’d have done if Sprint had actually proactively issued me credits every time their service sucked on my phone…

I know that ultimately the people who commented on this thing were the hardcore users who didn’t have anything better to do, namely because several cited ruined nights and weekends because they didn’t get the next DVDs in their queue, which even if you were really looking forward to something is just a tad bit over-dramatic. Particularly scathing to me were those who cited that they were going to leave and go to Blockbuster Online, which only tells me how deluded they’ve gotten if they actually think that they’re going to get a better experience from the evil that is Blockbuster – I think if it were a toss-up between watching my grass grow and going to Blockbuster to rent a movie, I’d be in the market for a new lawn chair mighty quick. Oh well – their loss.

Am I letting Netflix off easy? Granted, Sara and I go through maybe a movie or two a week from them and lately we’ve actually been sitting on them for quite a while, so clearly we’re not of the caliber of customer who is watching and returning DVDs just as quickly as Netflix can ship ’em to them. Then again, I’m sure that many would argue that ultimately customers with such high rental volumes probably aren’t making them any real money, anyways, so losing a few dozen heavy users here and there could very well be deemed akin to when Sprint cut loose a bunch of their customers with high levels of complaints last year. I’m certainly not suggesting that’s the intent here – I really think that this was just a prime example of shit happening and people are just so used to horrible customer service at this point from everybody else that they don’t even recognize a good thing anymore…

Until we see a day when it’s commonplace to get one of these from Bright House when the cable goes out or even Progress Energy when the power dies, I think Netflix is still the company to model your customer service after. Ha – if Progress gave me a credit every night the power flickered, they’d be paying me each month!