Saturday, June 21, 2008

Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing: A Plea to Netflix

I work in IT. Not surprisingly, this means I get to do a fair amount of support for broken computers. In my case, it's mostly for a handful servers from a particular well-known vendor. Since we pay a premium for the top-level support, I tend to be pretty satisfied when calling in for failed components. The calls basically tend to consist of "What's broken?", "Let's run a quick diagnostic to make sure", "Do you want a technician or just parts?", and "Do you want it there tomorrow, or this afternoon?".

Then one day, I had to make a call in for a desktop. Same vendor, still had one of the higher level support contracts, and still quite obviously a hardware failure.

Unfortunately, this meant that instead of getting routed to a bunch of IT-savvy techs determined to keep my downtime to a minimum, I got to deal with the general home user support group.

Now, I do enough end user support to be able to sympathize with quite a bit of what these guys go through. I really don't mind them asking me really basic questions like "Is the computer on fire?"; I've had users who would neglect to mention this when asking why we turned off their Internet. I completely understand them strongly wanting to get an error code back before they'd start shipping replacement parts; I wouldn't be surprised if they've had users who didn't understand that you need to put a blank CD in before they can make a mix CD of their pirated MP3s. I won't pretend to like these things, but I understand they're necessary and don't hold it against the poor people at the other end of the line.

No, what bugs the hell out of me when they keep claiming they're "sorry". Yes, that's right, every time I talk to a new person, and every time I mention something that's a problem, they rattle off, all in one quick, unconvincing, insincere, scripted breath, "Oh-I'm-terribly-sorry-sir-I-feel-really-bad-about-that-I-hope-that-we-can-fix-the-problem-and-I'm-sorry-for-the-inconvenience" .

Oh, really? You feel personally bad about every annoying user with a broken coffee cup holder who can't tell you if it's plugged in because the power's out? Bull. After the fourth or fifth time, I'm actually far more annoyed than if you just said "Okay" and punted me off to the tech in line, because it's quite obvious that you're lying to me. I'm paying the extra support money for tech support on the product. If I wanted someone to talk to and empathize with me, I'll to find a qualified therapist and talk about my childhood, thank you very much.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, Netflix.

As I'm sure that anyone who has a Netflix account, reads techie news sites, has an Internet connection, or uses electricity has heard by now, Netflix is removing the profiles feature, which lets you split up a single account into separate queues and preferences. This lets multiple people share a single account, rather than each buying their own - perfect for households with more than one person.

Now, the canceling of this feature is bad enough. My wife and I use this, and let me tell you, it's a lot easier than trying to come up with ratings that accommodate chick flicks, romantic comedies, sci-fi, and anime. I mean, seriously, how many people really like all of those categories?

As if that weren't bad enough, though, Netflix had to take it one more step. They decided to just give all their profile users a father-knows-best pat on the head, and tell 'em "It's for you own good." Like the tech who personally fells the pain of each and every of the thousand customers per day, Netflix has spun a falsehood that is insultingly transparent:

As a Netflix product manager I'm tasked with the wonderful job of helping members find movies they'll love. But today my job is more challenging as we've decided to terminate the profiles feature on September 1. Please know that the motivation is solely driven by keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible. Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website.

Let me get this straight. You have a feature that, while perhaps not wildly popular, is strongly loved by those who do use it. "Some" people allegedly find it "confusing" (we'll assume for the moment that Netflix has legitimate data to back this claim up), so rather than, oh, I don't know, fixing the problem, you just decide to nuke it completely. How does that "help" users?

Now, where Dad could give 5 stars to Goldfinger, Mom could give 5 stars to Pretty Woman, and Junior could give 5 stars to Shrek, Netflix will be trying to analyze a single person that would give 5 stars to all three movies. I can only imagine the bizarre recommendations for such split personality victim! How does that "help" users?

Before, each member of the household would have their own queue, and would get their own next movie for each one sent back. Now they'll have to carefully shuffle the queue each time one goes back to make sure that the right next movie goes back, or else Junior sending the cartoon he just watched back will land Julia Robert's latest movie in the mailbox. How does that "help" users?

If you're going to pull out some backend code that implements this feature, fine - but I doubt there's a software engineer on the planet who thinks it's a good idea to pull a feature away before you have something more compelling to convince your customers to give you money.

If maintaining the feature is taking up too much time, or is getting you stuck in some expensive patent war, then tell us you can't afford the feature and we'll probably understand and get over it.

But please, please, please - don't just rip the feature out of our hands and tell us it's for our own good. It's a blatant lie of the worst kind - a marketing lie - and once your customers think that you're lying to them, they're quite liable to take their money off to one of your competitors in a hurry.

You can trust me on that.

1 comment:

black magic woman said...

I agree with your comments. It looks like the 900+ commenters on the netflix community blog are also not thrilled with Netflix's new policy.

I called customer service about this very issue. I told them that if netflix is committed to ending profile support they need to pay their programming staff to have an export/import feature to a new account.