If other companies were smart, and they mostly aren’t, they would adopt Netflix’s strategy of having periodic outages then apologizing and offering credits without their customers having to do anything. Whenever this happens (as it apparently did on August 30) we get a flood of delighted emails from their customers, many of whom didn’t even notice the outage in the first place.

For example:

I tried to watch Netflix on my Xbox and it was not connecting correctly. I did not think to much of it and I found this in my inbox!!! YAAA For 3% credit without asking!!!!

and

I am seriously impressed with Netflix. I didn’t even complain about this (nor was I planning to), the system detected the problem on its own. Now if only Comcast would do the same thing.

and

Awesome example of why Netflix is dominating the video market. The service was down for less than 5 minutes, but they still took the time to issue this email (and a credit, even though it’s a small one). This just reinforces my decision to switch from Blockbuster On-Demand a few months ago.

It’s a lesson other companies should learn. You can take keep current customers and maybe win some new ones simply by treating them fairly. It is possible.

(Photo:formatc1)

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