Netflix Back, Sorta: How Much Slack Do You Give Companies?
I’ve been watching the Netflix situation mostly as a customer whose queue is at a standstill, but also for entertainment value. The comments on the Netflix Community Blog regarding the outage are hilarious. Mostly because there are different factions of customers berating each other.
Seems there are two extremes of customers — those to whom any glitch in service is a personal affront, and the other type that focuses on the years of good service and are willing to cut some slack.
Group A is bitching about how Netlflix is only reimbursing 15% the monthly fee, when it should be 25% for a full week or more because of the price of renting subsititue movies, and all sorts of entertaining analogies like Best Buy or pizza delivery:
If you ordered and paid for a $12.00 large pizza and they delivered the $8.00 small, but offered to give you back $4.00 on your next order — you wouldn’t be running around thrilled about how great the pizza place is for giving you a credit.
Group B thinks this is a one-time glitch and are insulting the complainers in a variety of ways, calling them spoiled, or must be really hard up if a few bucks is worth bitching about:
I am completed fascinated at the threats to cancel Netflix because they offered a 15% refund instead of 25%. You do realize for the $16.99 plan that’s less than $2?
Man, money must be really tight with some of you folks. Maybe you should cancel and add to your savings a bit so you can weather these storms.
Anyhow, I like to think myself in between these two extremes, but based on my past behavior — I tend to not give much slack to companies. This is likely evident from my Twitter boycott when I got pissed off enough at the downtime that I’d refrain from using a free service out of principle. But this comes about in other ways in the real world.
If we eat out at a restaurant and the service or food isn’t good, we’re polite and tip decently, but never return. I don’t cut restaurants much slack. I don’t have any sympathy for how hard it is to run a restaurant and all that; if your food sucks, I don’t return, and I certainly won’t show up again for a second go at digestive abuse.
(I once ate at a new taqueria and found a freaking push pin in the burrito. Needless to say, that place is on my “do not want” list.)
So if I’m unwilling to give a restaurant a second chance, I don’t feel I should have any more sympathy for any other company I encounter in the real world — or online. Just because someone’s running a tech company or a startup, and I’m into technology, I don’t cut them any slack. The service is good or not, and if it sucks, I’m not obligated to give it a second chance.
But then there’s the situation of being a satisfied customer for a while before a failing. Say you find a curly hair in a pie from your favorite pizza joint. Although disgusting — I’d cut them some slack and pray that was a one-time thing. Usually in that instance, the restaurant will give you a free meal laden with apologies.
Other times, I’ll give companies slack out of personal laziness — avoiding the hassle of calling customer service and being on hold for half an hour. For example, the other day my Netflix Roku box stopped picking up the stream in the middle of Mark Of Zorro. Assuming it was a network issue, we watched a DVD instead. The next day, the box worked fine. I could have spent an hour that night being annoyed and bothered, but it just wasn’t worth getting peeved at the time.
Then there’s the cheapness factor. A streaming movie is essentially free, and not exactly worth making a fuss over. I think my personal comfort level is around $10, based on how much I’d have to get shorted in change before getting pissed off. This obviously varies from person to person.
So back to Netflix. I’m annoyed that we haven’t gotten any new discs this week, but since the dollar amount is so piddly, I’m not jonesing to take the company to task. Plus, we’ve had really great service for the past few years.
Lastly, there’s the Netflix / Roku box which has been really awesome, and continued to work this whole time, while the mail distribution centers went haywire. It’s obvious Netflix wants to move their whole service to all-streaming and delivery over the internet, and do away with the whole very-analog, mailing discs in the mail thing.
This glitch is a good example why.