Inavero » Nathan Goff

Fanatical Client Service or Why I love Rackspace

Nathan Goff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:43:44 +0000

I am obnoxiously smitten with the hosting company Rackspace, so much so that my co-workers wonder if I secretly work for them in my off hours. We recently migrated our entire surveying and reporting technology platform to the Rackspace Cloud product. This has been one of the better technology decisions I have made while at Inavero. We were able to half our hosting expenses, while significantly increasing our reliability and scalability. All of you operations folks should be getting goosebumps right about now.

Four simple reasons why I love Rackspace so much:

Support – I can IM with them 24x7x365! No more “on-call” pager numbers = no more guilt when I contact support at 1AM.
Killer Product – the Cloud Sites and Servers are so easy to use and scale exactly as promised.
Communication – I always know if something is being planned that could affect my sites and even get nice emails warning me of issues with my Cloud Server and how to resolve them.
Fanatical Client Service – At Inavero we specialize in measuring a firms attention to client service, so I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Rackspace is definitely a good egg.

I have one final example of why I love the client centeredness of Rackspace so much. Rackspace recently experienced some failures in it’s technology systems that ended up affecting their clients. The client recovery from these failures is the best I have ever experienced with a technology services company. Below is a video that the CEO released within days of the outages that goes into great detail explaining what happened, sincerely apologizing for the downtime, and detailing what they will change to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is how exceptional companies recover from failure. They take 100% of the blame and quickly move to make things right. Way to go Rackspace!

A Kindergarteners Nightmare: Flying to Disneyland Without Mom and Dad

Nathan Goff — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:13:25 +0000

The following is a real life example of how American Airlines missed an opportunity to turn me into a promoter of their customer service, and instead their customer service became the topic of my blog post on poor customer problem solving.

American Airlines customer service manager says: “We can only take 50% of the blame for the problem. I mean…how do we know for sure that it was our fault that you don’t have reservations on the flight? You could have put a hold on the reservation and then let it expire. We just can’t know for sure.”

I reply: “Maybe because my 5 year old daughter is booked on the same flight, but now by herself? In what world is it ok to send your 5 year old on a plane ride to Disneyland by herself?”

After pondering this conversation and experience I wonder, should it matter? Why should any customer ever have to answer to an argument from a customer service manager about the % of blame they are willing to take in a problem like this? The real question is not who is to blame, but how can a solution be found?

American Airlines would serve it’s shareholders, employees, and customers much better if it took a play from the Southwest Airlines playbook and created a customer service culture that avoids laying blame and instead strives to find the solution. A solution that sends the customer off to promote the company’s great customer service and not off to write a blog post about how poor the customer service was. That is what leads to long-term profitability in tough economic and industry environments. It also generates Net Promoter Scores that crush the industry average.

Is the customer service culture within your company one that focuses on who’s fault it was? Or one that focuses on finding a solution that creates happy, loyal, and long-term customers?