Indeed, for the first time in its eight-year existence, Netflix has found itself losing customers. It is not the quality of customer service that is driving them away, but rather the heightened competition from Blockbuster. Late last year, soon after Blockbuster introduced its Total Access program, which allows members to swap a movie they have rented online for an in-store movie, the nationwide chain began gaining on Netflix’s base of 6.7 million subscribers.

By the first quarter this year, after years of outstripping Blockbuster in subscriber growth, Netflix added 480,000 new subscribers while Blockbuster signed up 780,000 new members. And in the second quarter of this year, Netflix, which prides itself on customer loyalty, lost 55,000 customers. Blockbuster added 525,000, bringing its total to 3.6 million.

The Hillsboro operation, which occupies about 30,000 square feet of a low building in an office park, is intended to keep the red envelopes coming. Michael Osier, vice president for information technology operations and customer service, said he rejected cities like Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, which are known as call-center capitals, because of their high employee turnover rates. He settled on the greater Portland area because of the genial attitude on the part of most service workers.

Image Autumn Daste, one of 200 customer service representatives at the Netflix call center. Credit... Andrew M. Daddio for The New York Times

“In hotels and coffee shops and the airport, it’s amazing how consistent people are in their politeness and empathy,” said Mr. Osier, who is based at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. “There’s an operational language in the industry that people are so jaded about — phrases like ‘due to high caller volume.’ We’re very consciously trying to counter that mentality.”

Netflix’s decision to eliminate the e-mail feature was made after a great deal of research, Mr. Osier said. He looked at two other 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. “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.

When Mr. Osier presented his findings in January to fellow executives, Reed Hastings, the Netflix chief executive, sent an enthusiastic message, BlackBerry to BlackBerry, from across the room. Mr. Hastings quickly became a supporter of the e-mail elimination project.