I love it when I experience great customer service, when people go above and beyond to make your experience just that much better. Maybe I am lucky, but it seems like about once a week I have an above average experience. It has happened to me a couple times already this week; the customer service rep on the phone who reversed a fee even though they did not have to and the waitress who brought my son a cupcake because they were out of the dish that he ordered and he had to “settle” for another one. I normally would not write about fantastic customer service here, but I got an interesting e-mail about an outage that Netflix experienced that is an example of great customer service (I got the e-mail on Tuesday, September 1, 2009):

Netflix Outage

The most interesting thing about this is that I did not try and watch any Netflix Movies or TV shows on my XBOX on Monday night (ironically I was watching an old school Netflix DVD: Slumdog Millionaire). For the record I did not request the 3% credit on my billing statement, I would feel too guilty if I did.

I am not sure the criteria that they used to send this out to their customers, but I can tell you that I do watch movies and TV shows on my xbox quite regularly so I am clearly a customer who might have been affected by this outage. They could not have sent it out to only those people who were affected because it was an outage, they don’t know who might have been affected. Netflix was proactive in acknowledging the fact that they had a technical issue and proactively “making it right for their customers”. They did not wait for the customers to call and complain to get a credit, because they know that many people would not and just think the service was unreliable. Other companies could learn a lot about dealing with outages by following the Netflix example..