Media Temple’s Unexpected Quality Customer Service [Old Content]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:37:44 +0000

Media Temple has had downtime recently that affected large swaths of its customer base, and I was one of them. Being down overnight quickly spiraled into a week's worth of sporadic uptime, sluggish server response, and a host of other issues - just look at their incident reporting.

Naturally, I demanded a refund for the month, since I've been a customer for two years and have put up with their growing pains. But being down for days and days in a row, in addition to their rather regular "we don't know what broke" events and "scheduled maintenance", doesn't equate to the uptime they promise. They agreed, and said more information would be available after they resolved the issues.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email yesterday, notifying me of a $200 credit to my account - that's 5 months of service! I logged into my account to double-check and found this:

Well, well, Media Temple. Despite my usually-frustrating interactions with your customer service and technical support, you've managed to surprise me and exceed my expectations.

This rarely happens, for anyone, so feel free to celebrate...

You've managed to keep me as a customer for the foreseeable future.

Netflix Downtime [Self]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:39:27 +0000

As I'm sure you've noticed from any number of sources (blogs, newspapers, word of mouth, etc.), Netflix had a 3-day shipping problem which they've apparently resolved today.

Their answer to a week-long situation (depending on who you are and where you live it could have been longer than the 3-day period) is to give a refund of 15% from the next billing cycle.

It's a good idea, but I have a better one: why not double the movie output?

If Netflix were to double the movies for each customer, on a one-time basis, I think that would cover their refund needs, as well as provide instant gratification for their userbase. As it is, people are complaining that 15% should be closer to 25%, based on the average 4 weeks in a month, as well as wondering if it will actually happen, since there's rumors of them not following through on other refunds/fixes previously.

So, in short, if you were a 2-at-a-time plan, they would ship the one or two you already had waiting to go out to you... but also 2 more from the top of your queue.

Before anyone decides to try and argue with me:

yes, they would temporarily have a smaller inventory

yes, it would cost them a little more money than the average day of shipping

yes, it might take longer than usual for those extra movies to come back

But I still think it would have been a better choice than the future refund.

And they didn't do this because... why?

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For some echo chamber coverage, see The Consumerist, Epicenter, BoingBoing Gadgets, NewTeeVee, Valleywag [1] [2], and The Inquisitr.

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Update (8/15/2008 6:04pm PST): NewTeeVee tipped the hat.

Kyle Brady: Blog » Downtime

Media Temple’s Unexpected Quality Customer Service [Old Content]

Netflix Downtime [Self]