The New York Times today reports on how Netflix is bucking the trend towards email and self-service by moving its entire customer service operation to phone-based agents.  The reason?  According to the Times, the company's vice president of information technology operations wanted to model their approach after companies with reputations for superb phone-based customer service, Southwest Airlines and American Express, and saw that customers preferred human interaction over e-mail messages.

He says, “My assessment was that a world-class e-mail program was still going to be consistently lower in quality and effectiveness than a phone program,” he said.

A few weeks ago, we spoke about another company, Scottrade, that is also using voice as a competitive differentiator.