Network Security Blog

First of all, this post has nothing to do with security, I just felt like ranting for a couple of minutes.

Over the last few days I’ve had two brushes with customer service, one of which left me feeling good, the other, well, the other just didn’t. Years ago I worked in the service industry, which left me with a critical eye for how others perform their customer service. As with many things in my life, I like to compliment the good behaviors and call out the bad ones. This is a rather long rant, so I’ve placed most of it in the extended entry.

I’ve been with my ISP for several years now and every time I’ve had to deal with their technical support department, it’s been a positive experience. Sonic.net is a local ISP that was started by two students from the local junior college over a decade ago, and it has become one of the largest independently owned ISP’s in the nation. In all that time and throughout the tremendous growth they’ve experienced, they’ve managed to maintain a very high level of customer service.

Wednesday night my sons yelled for Daddy because they couldn’t get to Nickjr.com. A little troubleshooting showed me that all my equipment was working fine, that the problem was somewhere upstream from the router. I called into the Sonic office to find out if they new anything, and they already had a message stating that SBC was having problems with their DSL circuits. All in all, it was less than 15 minutes between when the circuit went down and when I called.

I know it doesn’t take much to put a message on an answering machine, but the fact that they did it so quickly and left a concise message that explained the problem impressed me. So often in my professional career I see companies (and even groups within my own organization) who are so afraid of any negative press that they’ll barely even admit a problem exist. This rarely helps shield you from the criticism, since everyone knows there’s a problem, and respects the company less for the cover-up. From a customer standpoint, I’d rather be advised of what a problem is and know the company I’m dealing with is on the problem.

My other dealing was with Netflix. Let me start by saying I still love the Netflix, and their customer service is above average, but their attitude towards the customer (me) left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I started up my Netflix subscription about 6 months ago, and when I started the turn around time for movies was between three and five days, not including weekends. Then about two months ago it slowed down drastically; movies started taking at least five days for turn around, sometimes taking over a week.

At first I thought it was a change in something at the post office. I tried sending my movies back from different locations, ie. the box on the corner, from work, etc. When this had no effect on the situation, I let it go for a while. Then I realized that one of the changes I noticed was the time between Netflix receiving a return movie and sending out the next one. When I started the service, they’d receive the movie and send out the next one in my queue later the same day. More recently, it seemed they were taking longer to log the return back in, and then it was taking over a day, sometimes two before my next movie was sent out. This felt a little strange to me so I went to their website to complain.

For finding and requesting movies, the Netflix site is excellent. But for reporting any sort of problem, it’s obvious to me they’ve gone to great lengths to obfuscate the process. For example, I received a Godzilla movie several weeks ago (for the kids, honest) which wouldn’t play on any of my DVD players, but would play on my computer. Turns out it wasn’t a region 1 DVD (encoded for US/Canadian players). I logged onto the site to point this out to Netflix, but the web page only has three options, and does not allow for any comments. Strike one.

Back to my experience with DVD turn around time. It took me over 15 minutes of searching the Netflix site to locate an email address to send in a complaint to. I had to go through several layers of ’self-help’ pages, got returned to my starting point several times and just found this portion of their web site inordinately confusing. I finally found the email address hidden in a link near the bottom of one of the pages, but I never did find a phone number. Strike two.

I sent off an email stating my issue, and in fairly short order I received a canned reply telling me to try sending my DVD’s from another location yada yada yada. I dislike this time of lazy customer service intensely, so I replied explaining that I knew the issue was with their internal turn around time, not the Post Office. I didn’t really expect them to be able to do anything about it, but I wanted to express my concerns over a problem I perceived. What I got in return was the first positive in my experience with Netflix customer service: an explanation of how their system works.

Here is how we process and ship our DVDs:

Thanks,
Christina,
Netflix Customer Service .

This explanation upset me. Basically what Customer Service was telling me is that by being a heavy user of the Netflix service, I am lowering the priority I’m given in their queue. I get penalized for actually using their service while the infrequent users are rewarded. After I cooled down and thought about this for a while, it makes perfect sense from a business perspective. But from the customer’s perspective, this really sucks. It shows me that they have actually gone out of their way to make my experience with Netflix less than it could be.

I understand that Netflix is trying to give as many customers as possible a good experience, and limiting the number of movies I can rent in a month is one way they do this. But it leaves me feeling cheated. I’m paying the same amount of money as the guy in the next cube over, and I expect to be treated in the same way. But because I’m considered a heavy user, I get treated like a second class citizen.

Okay, my rant is over. Here you have two customer service experiences, one good, one not so good. I still love Sonic.net’s service, but I’m now a lot less enamoured with Netflix. I doubt I’ll be changing to Blockbuster, Walmart or going back to the local video store. But I’m going to examine my options, something I wouldn’t have done before yesterday.