Netflix's Fascinating Cancellation Questionnaire

It's interesting what you can do with a questionnaire...

Back in the day (a few years ago) I worked as a full-time dating coach. As you can imagine, there was always a credibility gap for potential clients, and one way we'd try and mitigate that was to offer (and to absolutely honour) a complete money-back guarantee - if you didn't get $3,000 worth of value out of your weekend, you could have your money back, just by asking for it.

As a coach, with the way the business model set up, even one customer asking for their money back was a financial disaster - there were lots of sunk costs in terms of accommodation and flights.

Anyway, through sensible use of a questionnaire, I got my personal refund rate down to literally 0. None of my 600 students (over the timeframe I ran workshops) asked for their money back, and I attribute it to the questionnaire (and our being awesome dating coaches ;-))

The workshops were split in to 5 hours of seminar on each of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and 4 hours "in the field" on Friday and Saturday nights. We had to maintain a 3:1 student to instructor ratio, and could sell up to 12 places on the weekend. As a Lead Coach, I was responsible for all of it (and had laid out the cash from my pocket for all of it, too).

On both Saturday and Sunday morning, I'd give the students a questionnaire, although Saturday was by far the more important of the two. I'd start by asking them general questions, phrased to get them thinking about the positives:

* What's been your favourite aspect so far? * What's been your key learning point so far? * How many girls did you talk to last night? * Describe the best interaction you had last night... * What are you going to try and do differently tonight? (on the Saturday)

As Tony Robbins says, the quality of your life is determined by the questions you ask yourself. Students will typically have had a LOT of great experiences, but also a few blow-outs, and a few low points in the evening. What I wanted to do was to focus them on the best aspects of what they'd learned.

Our big worry was always that we'd get someone who'd come along, enjoy the program, and then ask for their money back right at the end because they were cheap. Now technically they weren't allowed to do this - the money-back guarantee stipulated that they had to tell us and give us time to fix anything they weren't enjoying.

So to me, the crucial questions were then:

* Which coach did you work with? * Would you be happy to work with them again tonight? (on the Saturday)

Now the coaches were great guys, and what's more, would all go the extra mile for students. Students would run, hide, tell coaches they didn't want to do it anymore, etc, but the coaches would stick with the guys and MAKE them talk to girls. And the students LOVED them for it. By capturing the student's enthusiasm for the coaches in writing, I got two things:

Firstly there was an implicit agreement that they were having a good time. And that was good, as long as the student /was/ having a good time. But also it gave us time to spot any problems WELL in advance. Every workshop, one guy out of 12 would have had a not-great time on the first night. Some students and instructors just did not get along, some guys had some really deep-set problems, and needed one-on-one love-bombing.

Without the questionnaires (and at first, I was the only Lead Coach using them), these were the guys who asked for refunds. By getting them to answer questionnaires early in to the process, we were able to identify them and take corrective action...

Anyway! That's quite a wall of text, so:

tl;dr: you can use questionnaires to change the way people think about things, and also to catch problems well before they happen...

Netflix's number one problem is that the companies who own the content don't (for the most part) want them to succeed. They take too much power away from the content owners. Netflix would happily offer EVERYTHING via streaming. The content owners would rather Netflix weren't allowed to send disks out by mail, but there's that pesky problem that it doesn't violate copyright law.

Maybe Congress will create compulsory licensing for streaming like the compulsory licensing that makes radio possible. Or maybe they will allow content owners to license DVDs instead of selling them and Netflix will cease to exist.

I have dealt with cable companies and I have dealt with Netflix, and I know which side I am on.

It's refreshing to see that Netflix acknowledges their shortcomings (picture quality, streaming catalog, etc) and recognizes these might be reasons people would quit. And that they recognize that some people may be quitting to go to Hulu -- which they even point out right on the survey that it's cheaper -- or to Pirate Bay.

It's like a 12-step program: to solve problems in your service and compete, the first step is to admit you have problems and high competition.

Then you can figure out which ones are driving people away and to where, and target all your work to that.

Am I the only person that thinks that's a pretty complicated looking questionnaire to give a user when leaving your service, or does Netflix have unusually intelligent/savvy customers?

One option that I noticed is missing-and because of which I considred cancelling my netflix account- is that streaming is not available on your account if you travel outside the country. Even though I know how to get around it, why do I need to feel like I'm doing something illegal to access something I paid for?

For $8 bucks a month I find it to be a great value, even if I only watch 5 to 7 things a month. To use OnDemand I would need Cable TV and have to pay $50 to $60 more.

Blizzard has a similarly comprehensive questionnaire for canceling a World of Warcraft account.

Netflix instant selection is too limiting. Also, I wish it were better organized. But all in all a great product. I am seriously considering canceling my cable and replacing it with Hulu or Netflix. Charter wouldn't have a questionnaire like this that's for sure.