Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

I love Netflix. They're a role model for other companies, and for me as a person.

Netflix has succeeded on the strength of two things: integrity and ambition.

They genuinely care about their customers. They work extra hard to make sure people who give them money are happy to do it. In their call centers, CSRs are friendly and empowered. They're instructed to err on the side of doing things that are most likely to make a customer happy, instead of pissing people off with stupid "it's policy!" behavior. In their distribution centers, they have a hardcore quality control culture that goes to great lengths to ensure that mailed out DVD's correctly match a customer's order.

Contrast this with their dying competition, who never once gave a damn about customer satisfaction. Who, indeed, codified policies whose direct result was to enrage customers.

As for ambition, Netflix has continually worked hard to make the service the very best it could be, opening more and more distribution centers to minimize the wait between returning and receiving your DVDs. Despite having every reason to rest on their laurels, they decided they'd also be the Netflix to their Blockbuster, going deep on the Watch Instantly strategy that's redefining their business. Instead of waiting for someone else to come along and make them obsolete, Netflix grabbed the bull by the horns.

This is one of the rare moments of modern capitalism producing something truly excellent, on its merits, based on the needs of the market. If only we could see similar disruption in larger and even more corrupt industries.

Honestly: I love these guys.

I wasn't so lucky with them. I was a good customer, but they started silently throttling my account, and they wouldn't admit to it either. It's since come out that that's exactly what they were doing.

If it's too expensive to send me that many disks, fine, but don't lie to me about it.

I didn't know about this. So much for my remark on integrity. Do you know if they still do this throttling?

I personally never ran into this -- I've never been more than a light-to-medium user, except in spikes. Like when I when I discovered 24 six years ago.

edit: Here's something straight from the horse's mouth:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...

"I stopped my subscription to your service because of your well-documented "throttling" of frequent renters. How can you say you are focused on customer service when you alienate your customers in this way? Bill Greenstein, Seattle

When we are short on new releases, which we try not to be, we believe it's fairest to allocate those new movies to subscribers who have not rented much recently. This upsets heavy users because they are not in the front of the line for new releases. We are straightforward about how it works, but not everyone likes that policy."

Eh, okay, assuming it begins and ends there, I can see the argument for doing things this way.

The accusation was that if you were an exceptionally heavy user of the service, they'd start taking 2 or 3 days to send your next movie after you returned one.

That said, I'm not sure what the threshold was, because I was a very heavy user during that time and I never hit the problem. As such, whatever the threshold was, it was high.

I don't really go for new release type movie generally, so I call shenanigans.

I was a heavy user who got movies sometimes the day after I returned the last one, which was great. Then I started getting them 3, 4, 5 days later.

They blamed USPS, even though no other mail to or from me was slow at all, so I started tracking the returned movies. They uniformly were delivered back to the warehouse just as quickly as before, but remained (via the netflix interface) unreturned for several days after that.

Normally I'd chalk that up to simple incompetence: they just weren't processing the movies very fast and/or their backend system was a piece of shit. I could buy that.

But I'd seen just how efficient they could be when they _wanted_ to be, ie before I passed the "heavy user" threshold, so I knew they were doing it deliberately.

I get the logic, I'm a heavy user, they can only send so many movies before I'm not profitable. But like I said before: don't lie to me about it.

I would've paid extra for a premium "heavy user" account if they had offered me the option, but instead they pretended USPS was magically slow JUST for netflix movies, and they permanently lost a customer.

Their loss.

Addressing the 'Their loss' comment - Netflix could be happy you left from a business standpoint. I've talked to wireless carrier network execs who can speak specifically to the type of subscribers who they would like to encourage to leave the network.

They are only happy because they weren't charging me enough, and I was willing to pay that extra cost too, so it really is their loss.

I live in a big city where they have a local warehouse and they consistently ship movies to me really fast. I'm on the cheapest plan ($8/mo) and when I send a movie back, they get it the next day, and in the same day send out a new one. At that level of service it was already easily worth $8, but now they have an awesomely expanding offering of HD streaming content which makes it tremendously more valuable to me.

I've only talked to them once (I was annoyed that there was no option for communication except phone), but the guy I talked to was very helpful, friendly, receptive, and did indeed seem empowered.

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