59. Acknowledging Mistakes & Being Honest

I received this email today. I was pleasantly surprised.

Many people are familiar with Netflix. I myself am battling an addiction to it! Last night their site went down for a while and no one could watch any videos instantly. In a great show of customer service they sent an unprompted email to their subscribers offering a small credit for the inconvenience - all you had to do was click the button and it was instantly applied. I did the math and the credit was only for $0.24. That's not really a huge dent to anyone's wallet but is still an awesome show of loyalty to their customers and to their service. I was encouraged because it's so rare that a company will do this. In fact, it happened to me about 5 months ago as well when I was trying to watch. I got the same offer then. I learned a lesson today about owning up to your mistakes and making things right. However, that's the most important thing I learned from this experience.

My immediate thought when I received this was, "I wonder how much they are going to lose total on this?" On their site, Netflix claims to have over 20 million subscribers! If everyone of those clicked the button for the credit, Netflix essentially offered to give back up to $4.8 million. Yeah. Now here's the thing - I wasn't actually trying to watch anything at the time that the site went down. I wasn't inconvenienced by the short outage and I didn't need $0.24. For about 5 seconds I debated before choosing to do the right thing. The honesty of this company inspired me to be honest in return, even though I had every "right" to claim the credit. I wish that this kind of thing happened more in life.

LIGHT BULB! It can. I was inspired by the humility and honesty Netflix displayed. Which means that others can be inspired by me (and you)! In the words of Ghandi, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It really works.

Also, I just really want to toot the Netflix horn. Last summer I decided to forsake cable and satellite companies. Since then I've received better quality, better customer service, and a price that is less than 10% of what I was paying before. The one drawback is that I don't have access to live or very recent television. But the internet provides plenty of free and legal options to make up for that, such as Hulu. If you've been wondering about Netflix, I say take the plunge. Totally worth it.