Thursday
Jun192008
Bad Netflix, no biscuit!
Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 9:58AM
Grrr. I've been a Netflix member since *wayyyy* back in 2000. It was a pretty awesome service back then. Then in 2005 they added "queues", which let you split your account up into virtual sub-accounts. This was fantastic and I've been a big proponent of the feature ever since it launched. In brief: our account is on a grandfathered four discs at-a-time plan. It used to be that if Karin wanted a movie I didn't want to watch I had to go futz with the queue to put it on top, and then if I sent back the next disc I'd rearrange and so forth. It worked but the queues made things much simpler. Karin got her own queue, she could log in and get her own recommendations, manage her own queue and so forth. If she sent a disc back, she got the next disc on her queue. I had my own queue, we had a queue for discs we both wanted to watch, and then the final disc was a queue for television DVD's. I loaded up all of the Sopranos into that queue and whenever we sent back a Soprano's disc, then next one showed up. It was really very cool. I wish I could write it is very cool but Netflix has decided to remove the queue feature. All the work Karin put into customizing her recommendations or I put into customizing mine? Simply thrown away.
Here's the very short blog post on the matter. While I'll admit it was a bit clunky and some improvement would have been nice, there's a serious baby & the bathwater problem here. I skimmed the 200+ comments and found this one which seems reasonable to me.
I'm not quite sure about using the "Suggestions" page to send a complaint, but as far as I can tell Netflix doesn't have an email address for customer support, and they list their current wait time at over 10 minutes for the phone support. So I just posted the following message to them:
I'm entirely serious about being willing to investigate competition. If Blockbuster capitalizes on this and implements a similar feature I would switch from Netflix in a heartbeat. I've been a big fan of Netflix for years but this is just a dumb move. I've been a big fan because they've had a better solution than anybody else. Now they are choosing to both lost functionality and discard the data (recommendations and profiles) that would nominally tie the user to staying with them. Phenomenally poorly thought out.
I have to assume that they know all this and that they have decided that enough of their user base doesn't care about Profiles. But I also suspect that the "taste makers" and the people who jumped onboard with Netflix back when they were the only game in town will skew more towards the heavy users who derive a lot of value from Profiles. Netflix is in the opening stages of convincing their users to switch from discs in the mail to streaming, and that's a dangerous window because if I make that switch I could switch to an Apple TV or Xbox 360 at the same time. It's a poor moment to anger their hardcore consumer base.
Here's the very short blog post on the matter. While I'll admit it was a bit clunky and some improvement would have been nice, there's a serious baby & the bathwater problem here. I skimmed the 200+ comments and found this one which seems reasonable to me.
I called customer service (1-888-638-3549) about it, hoping to register my complaint through official channels (if you do this, be polite! It's not the phone rep's fault).
Anyway, it sounded like she had already heard about this a few times, and the suggested approach to deal with this is to post a suggestion on their site.
If this bothers you, I would recommend making sure that Netflix knows about it. Post your complaint to their Suggestions page. (http://tinyurl.com/yvmtcs)
Be honest, be sincere, be polite, and let them know how much it bothers you (likely to the point of seeking competitors).
Good luck! Like others have said, for me, this is a deal breaker - Profiles is the key feature keeping us with Netflix. Without it, in-store drop-off and in-store rental is far superior. I'm sad to leave Netflix after evangelizing it for so long, but if it goes away, I'll go with the superior product.
I'm not quite sure about using the "Suggestions" page to send a complaint, but as far as I can tell Netflix doesn't have an email address for customer support, and they list their current wait time at over 10 minutes for the phone support. So I just posted the following message to them:
I received an email about your elimination of the Profiles feature and like many other customers I'm very disappointed. I've been a Netflix subscriber since 2000, and a happy Profile user since they were introduced int 2005. Profile were one of the key differentiating features that made Netflix superior to the competition in my mind. Don't remove Profile unless you have a comparable replacement service.
Furthermore by removing Profile you are apparently discarding rating information that improved your recommendation service. Every time we return a disc we receive an email imploring us to rate the returned movie to improve our recommendations. If you discard all this data, you're intentionally "resetting" your recommendation algorithm to lose 3 years of rating data.
If a competitor introduces the Profile feature I will almost certainly switch my account to them. Netflix has been a fantastic service for the past 8 years, but this is a major step backwards in service quality.
Please reconsider this. Your email states "this change will help us continue to improve". I strongly disagree. If you want to improve or rework Profile than do so. But eliminating the feature outright doesn't help customers that don't use it and is a serious disappointment to the customers that do.
I'm entirely serious about being willing to investigate competition. If Blockbuster capitalizes on this and implements a similar feature I would switch from Netflix in a heartbeat. I've been a big fan of Netflix for years but this is just a dumb move. I've been a big fan because they've had a better solution than anybody else. Now they are choosing to both lost functionality and discard the data (recommendations and profiles) that would nominally tie the user to staying with them. Phenomenally poorly thought out.
I have to assume that they know all this and that they have decided that enough of their user base doesn't care about Profiles. But I also suspect that the "taste makers" and the people who jumped onboard with Netflix back when they were the only game in town will skew more towards the heavy users who derive a lot of value from Profiles. Netflix is in the opening stages of convincing their users to switch from discs in the mail to streaming, and that's a dangerous window because if I make that switch I could switch to an Apple TV or Xbox 360 at the same time. It's a poor moment to anger their hardcore consumer base.
Reader Comments (5)
It's possible that it's not just about whether or not people are USING the profiles... they surely have data related to usage of multiple queues vs. the existence of multiple accounts at the same address. The numbers may actually show that the willingness of people to have multiple netflix subscriptions in the same household outweighs potential loss from removal of this feature.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's one or more execs at Netflix who are pushing the belief that the number of subscriptions will go up as a result of this move rather than down.
Possibly, but I kind of doubt it. I bet somebody who is annoyed enough about the change to create a new account will also go ahead and shift that account away, just to express their displeasure. If Netflix was offering a way to migrate Karin's Profile into a separate account I'd give this theory a lot more credence, but they aren't. It would be just as easy to sign up for Blockbuster as Netflix at this point - and that's obviously a stupid move. In a market where the game is customer retention they are actively forcing people into free agency and I don't think there's any marketing angle that doesn't call that foolish.
I'll buy that they don't expect very many people to cancel, but even given the existence of a foolish executive, I don't see anybody thinking this would drive an increase. Also you can't have it both ways in that either the Profile users are an insignificant fraction of their userbase (so doubling it would be 2 x insignificant), or they are a substantial fraction, in which case this is a major risk they are taking. I think they are expecting to not notice a different in customer numbers come September.
My guess? They are coding up something else new and the new thing conflicts with Profiles. Somebody made a ROI call that the extra engineering reconciling Feature X and Profiles wasn't worth it. If I had to bet, they are doing something relating to streaming content and it wasn't playing well. Imagine (and I'm speculating) getting six movie download credits a month. Would the master Profile have to allocate them to Profiles they way they current allocate discs? Somebody has to figure all that out and maybe it just didn't seem worth the expense.
For some people, I can see this resulting in more accounts. If you already have many discs per queue, this isn't a financial hit, but at lower discs per queue it is costly to split into seperate accounts.
In my case, Caroline and I already have seperate accounts. When Caroline wanted to bump up her profile allocation a while back, that put us to 6 discs, and two 3-disc plans are actually a dollar cheaper. Since then I have bumped up to 4 discs to accomadate a profile for my mother-in-law, who I have now informed that she needs to get a seperate account. Net result, Netflix will make more money, as both her and I will likely end up with 3-disc plans as they are much more effective than 2-disc plans.
I completely agree though that Netflix is risking angering their hardcore base on this. Maybe Netflix thinks it is enough of a market leader that it no longer needs the goodwill it built up. That would be true in my case. I've been a subscriber since holiday '99 and for a few years would actively evangelize Netflix (like Tivo, another "insanely great" product of the time). At some point, though, that market was saturated - at work (at least in a silicon valley company) you just assume your coworkers have netflix. If you say "I just added that movie to my queue", everyone knows what you mean. I already bought my family gift subscriptions as holiday gifts, so it has already stuck where it would there. About the only thing being derated from "insanely great" to "a useful service" give them for me is that they won't be guaranteed to be at the top of my list to use for the emerging video download market. This could be where losing goodwill with their harcore base could really hurt them, as these are the people who they need to help them cross that early-adopter to mass market gap.
Yeah. I have four discs split into four single-disc queues, so there's no reasonable way to replicate that with multiple accounts. Which is a shame because I really strongly feel that's the perfect solution for something like watching TV on DVD. Splintering off that single disc and saying "every time I send back a Sopranos disc, send me the next one in the set" is the perfect solution. It's the way it *ought* to work. (I think the economics are even worse because I think my 4 disc Netflix plan is grandfathered and cheaper than what they offer these days. I'm not 100% on that though.)
I can't imagine that we'll convert to a 2-account household, I'll just go back to manually managing the queue the way I used to. But if a competing service introduces something like Profiles/Queues I would be strongly tempted to switch. Netflix is still a high bar in terms of quality and speed, but Profiles made the service vastly more useful than it will be come September.
Ah good. Netflix backed down. See my new post: http://www.hiddenjester.com/~tsanders/?p=595