We’ve always said that one of the true measures of quality customer service is how a company reacts to complaints. So it’s always good to hear about a company that doesn’t just respond well to a complaint, but preempts that complaint by proactively issuing a refund.

The other night, Consumerist reader TJ and his wife had rented a movie from Amazon through their Roku box.

“A few minutes into the movie, the playback froze, requiring us to exit out of the app and go back in,” he tells Consumerist. “After we got back in the playback was fine and we watched the rest of the movie with good quality and no more issues.”

So TJ wasn’t even really upset about the whole thing, as hiccups happen with streaming video and they were ultimately able to watch the movie they rented without any further problems.

But then today he gets an unexpected e-mail from Amazon.

“We noticed that you experienced poor video playback,” reads the e-mail. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for… $3.99

“While Amazon Video On Demand transactions are typically not refundable, we are happy to make an exception in this case.”

This was obviously a pleasant surprise for TJ, especially since he felt it was only a minor inconvenience and neither he nor his wife had complained.

Proactive refunds for streaming video are not necessarily new. Netflix, especially in the early days of its streaming service, earned a lot of love from customers by offering up refunds for large-scale outages. Those required the user to opt in to the refund, and were usually for a smaller amount, as Netflix does not charge a per-movie fee.

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