Pleasing Your Customers: Netflix vs. Charter

Yesterday I got this in an email from Netflix:

We’re sorry to report that we continue to experience issues with our shipping system, so some of you are not receiving DVDs in a timely manner and some of you have not received emails letting you know we got a DVD back from you.

We apologize and we’ll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed.

This is why I love Netflix. They’re honest. They’re proactive at making sure you get exactly what you pay for.

This made me think of the contrast to Charter Communications, my cable company. When Internet goes out in my neighborhood (like it did over the weekend), they don’t send me an apology and a credit for the downtime. They ignore it and hope I don’t complain. And if I do complain? They send out a repair guy that probably won’t fix anything and then charge me for it.

Originally this was going to be an encouragement to companies like Charter to be more like Netflix, but then I realized that Charter has a lot more power: they don’t have much competition in the area and people are dependent on their services. This is why they get away with charging way too much for services with questionable dependability.

So now this is a post about why oligopolies suck. How do we bring an end to big business rule over utility-type services? A question for another day.