![]() In contrast, Blockbuster outsources a portion of its customer service, and when people do call, they are encouraged to use the Web site instead. “Everyone else is making it almost impossible to find a human.” “It’s very interesting and counter to everything anybody else is doing,” said Tom Adams, the president of Adams Media Research, a market research firm in Carmel, Calif. ![]() Netflix’s decision to greet anxious consumers with a human voice, not an e-mail, is also unusual in corporate customer service. Megan Funk, a Netflix call center veteran, has worked at the site for eight months. Booz Allen Hamilton, a management consulting firm, and Duke University studied 600 companies last year and found a continued increase not just in outsourcing, but also offshoring, in which call centers are moved overseas. ![]() Netflix is bucking several trends in customer service. The company’s toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day. Then in July, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Netflix set up shop here a year ago, shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Funk is one of 200 customer service representatives at the Netflix call center here, 20 miles west of Portland, where she is on the front lines of the online movie rental company’s efforts to use customer service as a strategic weapon against Blockbuster’s similar DVD-mailing service. Megan Funk had been on the phone for 30 minutes and had already untangled one billing knot, listened to a woman insist that she had returned a Pilates DVD when it was clear she had lost it and received one request to replace a cracked copy of “Hotel Rwanda” and another to replace a disappointing husband.
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