When I dial the Netflix Customer Service number their robot asks me to enter a ‘‘six digit number’’ which can be found at bottom of the screen.
News stories often say that Netflix customers number above 20 million.
How can 20 million customers be identified using a six digit numbers?
Is it really a number or are there some letters?
It’s a temporary number assigned to your account when you look at the “Contact Us” page. They are recycled according to some rule. (Perhaps after your customer support problem is resolved, or after a time limit.)
Since only a tiny percentage of people will need to make customer support calls at any one time, there is no shortage of six-digit numbers to use.
That’s kinda clever–until you hit that person who writes down their number and the phone number so they won’t have to look it up again.
If the first digit can be a zero, that gives them the ability to get a billion discrete combonations out of the six digits.
Is it me or you whose math is way off?
I’m pretty sure it’s you. If you can use any combination from 000000 to 999999, that only gives you 1 million combinations. Maybe you meant “million” but accidentally typed a ‘b’?
How many of the customers are in the US and will be calling the US 800 number?
No, I meant billion, I just raised ten to the 7th instead of the 6th. Still my mistake.
Hey, if you’re looking for work, that’s the kind of thing US deficit-reduction negotiators prize highly.
How? 000000 through 999999 inclusive includes a million different numbers. If you add in blanks, you are merely adding another 10^5 [00000 – 99999] plus 10^4 [0000 – 9999] + 10^3 [000 – 999] + 10^2 [00 – 99 ]+ 10 ^1 [0 – 9], or 111,111. So even if you treat 000001 and 1 as different numbers, you only wind up with 1,111,111 combinations.
Heck, if you were going to do this, you’d be a lot better off adding in # and *, which would give you 12^6 or just under 3 million combinations (2,985,984 to be exact). Add in a seventh digit, and you get nearly 36 million (12 ^ 7 = 35,831,808) combinations.