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 24×7x365! 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!

Saks 5th Avenue sues customer over their mistake

Eric Gregg — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:56:07 +0000

Essentially – a clerk mistakenly sold a $75k+ jewelry set for around $25k. Big mistake – right? Well, they called the customer and offered it at a discount off of the regular price, or asked her to return it……problem is she asked the price, was told the price, and purchased the jewelry all at the $25k price and wasn’t willing to return it.

How you would ever think to ask for it back after one of your own employees was responsible for the mistake is gutsy enough, but when that didn’t work, they sued her for the total cost of the jewelry, plus any legal expenses! Now they have a legal and PR nightmare. All for the grand sum (at wholesale) of less than $30k.

So, while rival high-end retailer Nordstroms has a book focused on their exceptional customer service Saks is suing their high end clientele. We don’t do research for retailers, but I don’t need $100,000 worth of segmentation research to be able to tell the savvy Saks management this…..people who will purchase jewelry for $20k and up also hang around OTHER people who will purchase jewelry for $20k and up. You’ve created a brand assassin, negative press, and a legal nightmare for what?

Well played, Saks….. well played.

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Fanatical Client Service or Why I love Rackspace

Saks 5th Avenue sues customer over their mistake