Ultimately, the cons outweigh the pros. I will be voluntarily leaving Netflix for a new job in the very near future.
Netflix treats employees like they're completely expendable. I realize that no one is indispensable to a company, but Netflix uses up employees like I use up tissues when I have a cold. The turnover is ridiculous, and it doesn't have to be that way.
For CS reps, the main statistic used to determine our "worthiness" is the DSAT. Customers get asked a simple question after contacting customer service: "Were you satisfied with the call?" A "no" response counts against the rep, even if it was something the rep couldn't control (I'm sorry, it looks like your bank declined your card for this month's service fee.), or the customer was making an unreasonable demand (I got a disc that won't play! Give me six months of free service or I'm cancelling!). Netflix's stance is that we should be able to sugar-coat bad news so well that the customer doesn't hang up unhappy. This method of measurement is incredibly flawed and has led to reps "gaming" the system to avoid "no" responses.
Netflix does not give raises. Period. Not for cost of living, not for length of time employed, not even for outstanding performance. I have worked there 3+ years and my stats have been stellar the whole time. So stellar, I'm one of the people they have trainees shadow, to hear how to handle calls properly. I have *never* gotten a raise. Monetarily, Netflix considers my value to be the same as a new hire who just got out of training.
No paid time off. (Unless I want to take a pay cut and bank that toward paid time off.)
Mandatory overtime during the holidays. (They're promising it won't happen again this year, but that's what they said last year ... and we had mandatory overtime for three months last winter. And the winter before.)
Extremely limited career options - unless you want to be a CS supervisor, you're pretty much out of luck at the call center.
Narrow-focus hiring - Netflix hires people with EXACTLY the skills they need for a particular position. If that position goes away, so does the person. There is very little provision for cross-training or retraining a good employee to fit them in somewhere else.
TRaSE - one exception to the cross-training policy has been TRaSE, which is a disaster, so far. TRaSE combined the department that handles streaming tech support escalations with the department that handles loss prevention: billing fraud, shipping issues, physical inventory problems and website content issues. They all received cross-training, and even though there's more people to handle problems now, CS reps can never get a response when they have an urgent loss prevention issue. Reps have to tell customers "someone will get back to you within 1-3 business days." What happened to "one call resolution"? There's a guaranteed "no" response for my DSAT. Thanks a lot.
Workforce Management can't seem to forecast how much staff is needed; we will have weeks where they offer to let reps go home early every day, and then a couple of weeks later, they're offering voluntary extra hours and begging people to stay after their shifts. This is probably related to the fact that Marketing doesn't feel like they need to let anyone know about promotions until the last minute.
Speaking of Marketing, they don't seem to feel a need to ask anyone what kind of impact various promotions will have on the rest of Netflix's operations. The "no credit card necessary for a free trial" promo was a fiasco, much of which could have been avoided by asking some seasoned reps a few key questions.
The same can be said about some of the "tests" that Engineering sets up on the website. Isn't it logical to maybe ask a few questions of the people who actually talk to the customers before you try something out? I realize that we need to find out what works and what doesn't, but if a "test" makes the service unusable or unpalatable for a customer and they call to complain, CS reps can't remove them from the "test". Netflix is willing to lose the customer because that's a valid "test result". There has to be a better way.
The Canadian service was launched prematurely, in my opinion. Many of the calls we get from Canadian customers center on the lack of content, especially newer releases. The Canadian streaming library will grow, just like the US library, but that's not a satisfying answer to Canadian customers. Thanks for another "no" response on my DSAT, Marketing department!
