Netflix Makes It Easy To Reach a Human

msblack writes "In a move that goes against the prevailing trends of outsourcing and non-interactive customer support, Netflix has forsaken e-mail as a means of resolving customer problems. According to the NYTimes article, Netflix set up a call center in Portland OR, shunning other popular US call center cities (because Portland natives were perceived to sound friendlier) or off-shoring. 'It's very interesting and counter to everything anybody else is doing,' said Tom Adams, a market researcher in Carmel, California. 'Everyone else is making it almost impossible to find a human.'"

Depends on your service level

[Fozzyuw]

'Everyone else is making it almost impossible to find a human.'

Oddly, I would normally agree but recently I need support on my Dell XPS system (it's about a year old) after some water damage. I was reluctant to call Dell (as I've had some horrific experiences last time with my laptop) so I tried their online chat while looking up other contact information. the online chat was over 11min wait.

I found the XPS phone number and called it and I got through to a Tech. in less than 30 seconds. He also was clearly American and no distinguishable American accent (at least not to a Midwesterner). Needless to say, It was probably one of the easiest and fastest Tech. support calls I've had. Which is in stark contract to my laptop support I received years ago. I guess the XPS price tag does come with some perks other than a pretty fast computer.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:Yet another way Netflix is superior to Blockbus

[Belial6]

I still don't buy the 'throttling' rumors. When it was a big deal, I looked all over for some indication that Netflix was throttling delivery. I never found any. People would point to the Netflix terms of use as 'proof' that they admit to 'throttling'. There was never anything I found in their TOS that said they throttled. When people would explain what was happening to them, it always turned out that they just didn't get the movie that was a new release and at the top of their list.

I know that Netflix has rarely taken more than 1 day to receive my movies, and 1 day to get me a new one. This has been the case the entire time I have had Netflix, and I watch a LOT of movies. In fact, I usually go through about 30 movies a month on my three movie plan.

I think that part of the problem is that people get confused about what 'throttling' is. I know that Gamefly throttles. Throttling would be holding back deliveries. If Netflix sends you the second or third movie on your list because they don't have enough of the new release, and they give first priority to those that rent less, that is NOT throttling. In fact, doing the opposite would be throttling. If Young Sebastian only has one item on his list, and Ms. Black has 50, and there is only one copy of "Blades of Glory" left to send out. Sending it to Ms. Black would mean that Young Sebastian would be 'throttled', where as sending it to Ms. Black would mean that both people get a movie.

Re:Phew...

[frederec]

A similar story. I have a couple of friends in Seattle who are Indian. The man once was talking to a customer service person. He managed to recognize the (somewhat hidden) accent of the person on the other end of the line and started speaking Indian (not sure which language in particular). The call center person got really nervous and asked him to stop, because they weren't supposed to let on that they were Indian, and speaking their native language kinda blows it out of the water.

Re:Call center in Oregon...

[vigmeister]

I think there's a middle ground between your comments and mine though thank you for expanding, I didn't have time to better articulate my issues.

I agree with your issues having faced them myself. I have better luck with Indian reps because I am familiar with 'Indian English' :)

I'm sure the people in the Indian call centers are doing a fine job with what they have & I certainly don't fault them

Amex hires some good cutomer reps in India. They tell you their real name and don't hide their accent. They also communicate extremely well. However, this is an exception to the rule since most Indian cost centers focus so much on saving money that they hire incompetent and unskilled people for a pittance.

They're just trying to make a living however the limitations I mentioned do exist and there's not really much at presence to do with it.

Don't quite follow this last sentence (maybe becasue I am Indian ;) )

I am not denying the limitations and to put it in less diplomatic terms, Indian call centers are crappy. But I am fairly sure that the source of the problem is not the fact that it is Indian, but rather the fact that the companies are cutting costs to the point where the quality of service is atrocious. If they spent a bit more money, they could hire better employees and have more stable and clear connections to India. The companies provide us with the least level of quality that we will put up with, so some of the blame lies with us for not complaining or objecing to their service.

I ntoday's society I find a lot of people clubbing their objection to outsourcing and the quality of service to strengthen their argument against the low quality call centers in India. I think these are separate issues. I will accept that it would be easier for me to bitch about Indian call centers. If you do it, people might misconstrue it as an argument against outsourcing or xenophobia. If I do it, they take my argument at face value.

Cheers!

Re:Phew...

[vigmeister]

Amex is a good example of outsourcing. Their reps tell you their real names and don't hide their accents (most of them speak very good english and their accents are close to RP). I was making small talk with this rep while the 'computer was processing' and he cheerfully told me he was in Bombay and we talked a little bit about their then recent floods. He explicitly told me that he was required to speak in english to avoid any potential issues.

Cheers!

Re:Call center in Oregon...

[thatskinnyguy]

India has the most English speaking people of any country in the world. Fluently... that's another story.

I've worked with several people from India and their English was quite good and their grammar was impeccable. (better than mine at times) But basic turns of phrase, jargon, acronyms, and slang would leave them confused.

They, like most people, can learn to adapt to those kinds of things over time. Of course the people I worked with were either immigrants or here on student visas. So they were in the country for a good deal of time to absorb all of this extracurricular English. I can tell you one thing: the ones that will return to India aren't going to work in any call center.

Another point to Netflix:

[Kadin2048]

--You know, stuff like this actually makes me want to go out of my way to *support* NetFlix -- for doing the Right Thing(TM) for their CUSTOMERS.

Definitely; I'm proud to be a Netflix customer and happy to recommend them to anyone.

Another thing they did recently ... they reduced their prices. Sent me a letter in the mail, said 'hey, the plan you're on is now $14.95/mo instead of $19.95, congrats.'

I was really surprised. Most companies I would have expected to just bump me up one level of service (to the 4-at-a-time plan or something) while keeping me at the same price level, making me call them up to downgrade to my old level of service in order to save money. They didn't; they just dropped the price, and I didn't have to do a thing.

It's a little ridiculous that I get surprised by a company doing what ought to be the right and obvious thing, but that's how things work these days. Anyway, kudos to Netflix and whoever is in charge there. Hope they can keep it up.

Re:Call center in Oregon...

[CmdrGravy]

Well said, I have had numerous bad experiences with call centres and regardless of where the staff are actually located the same factors come into play which determine the quality of the service you recieve.

Any company intending to set up a call centre needs to make the following decisions

1) Do I employ people who understand the business we're engaged in or the cheapest person we can find.

2) Do we allow the staff to use their own initative when speaking to the customers and rely on their knowledge of the businesss or do with give the cheapest people we could find a script

3) Do allow our staff to take as long as is necessary, including time after the call has finished ( to update records of conversation, make enquiries etc ) to resolve the problem or do we assume that all problems can be fixed in 2.35 minutes and 10 seconds is plenty of time to get ready for the next call

4) Do we reward those staff who help our customers most and learn from their techniques or do we reward those staff who have the most calls

5) Do we expose our staff to the other departments in our business so they gain an understanding of them and build relationships with people there who can sort out customers problems or do we keep them locked in a basement and communicate to them in barked commands

6) Do we allow our staff the leeway to take decisions as to how to deal with a problem and provide a good resolution for the customer or do we encourage them to concede no ground, admit no failure and re-route the call to random departments or drop it when the heat goes up

Those places which make the right decisions may cost more to run but from a customers point of view are vastly preferable to deal with. Since a call centre is now probably my only exposure to any particular company ( apart from the actual service or whatever they're providing me ) then the performance of that call centre is a very important factor in choosing where to do business. It's nice that people are finally starting to realise that.

Re:Your response is pretty dodgy

[vigmeister]

He said "They are ESL."

You said "That should not have a bearing on the issue. Although I am from India (and ESL country)english was the first language I learnt."

Then you're not ESL, are you?

His earlier statements regarding ESL countries was what I was going for. There are several non-ESL people in ESL countries.

And on the gripping hand, you said "learnt" which is almost certainly a UK idiom, even tho used over here once in a while.

You mean a UK variant? 'learnt' is not an idiom.

None of what you said has much at all to do with his primary big picture complaint, that offshoring to ESL countries is a bad idea. All you have really done is dodged his compalints with hand waving. If you had some bacon, you'd have bacon and eggs, if you had some eggs.
Next time, try answering his hig picture complaint.

Convenient snippage here. Offshoring to ESL countries is not a bad idea. As long as you hire the right people and don't go overboard with cost cutting, you can still save some money without compromising service. Problem is that most companies outsource with the explicit purpose of cutting costs and go overboard.

Cheers!

On the other hand, you didn't capitalize "english". I don't know what to make of that.

This is slashdot, I make punctuation errors like there's no tomorrow. I fear no Nazis!

Re:Call center in Oregon...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a call center here in the US, and I'd -love- to have "10 seconds" to get ready for the next call. We literally have no time (if there's calls in queue) between calls, unless we go into "After Call Work" which hurts our stats and too much makes us look bad. We're rewarded based on many metrics aimed at helping the callers, though. I just wanted to state that I'd love in between time for my calls, it'd make my job so much better but supposedly it's not the industry standard.