HFTB Marketing Blog

I got an email yesterday from Netflix. They don’t typically barrage me with meaningless, salesy emails… so I opened it.

It was an apology. My first thought was: “An apology for what? I really enjoy Netflix and their new streaming service is awesome.” It is, by the way, awesome.

The apology turned out to be for a problem I might have experienced watching their instant streaming service over my Xbox 360. That’s right – might. They were proactively apologizing for something that I didn’t even have a problem with.

Here’s a screenshot of the actual email.

Now, the traditional wisdom on a situation like this might have been to wait for the complaints to come in and then respond to them in turn. After all, they wouldn’t want to alert subscribers like me that didn’t experience a problem that there might be something wrong with the service. Silly, isn’t it.

But I’ve heard thinking like this time after time from companies. The old, “let them come to us and don’t cause a problem in the meantime” strategy. Problem is, waiting for your customers to come to you with a problem isn’t good enough. And with the wealth of social media tools available to businesses today, there really isn’t any excuse for doing so.

The great thing about the Netflix approach is that they turned a negative into a real positive – even for subscribers like me that didn’t experience a problem in the first place.

To contrast this approach, take a look at Blockbuster. The purpose of this post is not to slam Blockbuster. We were subscribers for years. But the experiences have been so different to this point, I think it’s worth relating.

Blockbuster had a great program that allowed subscribers a certain number of titles at one time on a monthly basis… same as Netflix. However, Blockbuster’s differentiator was key for us. They allowed two in-store movie swaps per month. So not only could you get movies through the mail, you could also get instantly gratified in-store if you just had to check out the new Ben Affleck flick (unlikely, I know… but stay with me).

Problem was, Blockbuster canceled the in-store swaps. Okay, I get it… probably too expensive. My issue wasn’t with Blockbuster canceling the feature. It was the manner in which they did it. I might have received an email – not sure if I did or not. Blockbuster sends quite a few emails on a monthly basis typically with little relevant content. This equals a low clickthrough in my experience. I probably didn’t open it if I got it in the first place.

The way we found out that our subscription had been downgraded (features downgraded… not price, by the way, that cunningly stayed the same) was when the store clerk told me I could no longer swap the movie out as in the past. And that was the extent of the explanation. Evidently Blockbuster in store has no exposure to the Blockbuster Online account information.

So what’s the moral of the story? Simply put: Communicate with your customers. Good, bad or indifferent, just let them know what’s going on. Good businesses don’t need to hide behind customer service departments. They can preempt customer service calls by being straightforward and offering mea culpas when they make sense.

As a subscriber, I feel better about Netflix today than I did yesterday. Primarily because they screwed up!

What do you think about companies that take a proactive stance toward customer service issues? Have you had similar experiences, either positive or negative?

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