My wife received the following email from Netflix this morning:

This is a great email in so many ways.

The wording was not hastily thrown together. A lot of work went into making sure there were no unnecessary words in any of the paragraphs. It’s short and to the point. The tone is apologetic, but not incompetently so. There are no excuses and they don’t try to downplay the seriousness of the problem. They’re basically saying We screwed up, we’re sorry, we’re going to fix it. They offer us resources to get more information if we’re confused about what’s going on. They’re going to credit our account, which they didn’t have to do. Also, the layout is smart. They could have sent an unformatted email hoping that it would put some distance between the red Netflix theme and the screw up. Instead, they prominently display their logo and the Netflix colors – which makes me feel more like their taking responsibility for their mistake. Also, the width of the paragraphs is just right – not too compact, not too wide.

This reflects highly on their customer service.

Kudos to Netflix.