"Rackspace Sucks"

It’s what you’re hearing more and more these days. Rackspace is a direct competitor of ours, I have a lot of respect for their marketing and don’t have anything bad to say about them. They certainly are a leader in the hosting space.

It’s interesting to see how Rackspace came to prominence. It wasn’t through a distributed global network, it was not through a break-neck low cost hosting (as a matter of fact, they are among the most expensive), it wasn’t through any particularly innovative move – it was through service. They promised an answer on the first ring! Fanatical support!

Those things rock when everything is running ok.

They backfire when something goes wrong.

For example, one famous fish producing SPAM appliance maker sold our dumb ass customer $10,000 in equipment, most of it in warranty services and 24/7 coverage. The very first time we had a problem, the customer (let’s call him Rich for anonymity sake) called with a problem during early AM hours, the “24 hour support” guy told him that he has paged the lead engineer and will have an answer for him in the morning.

See, that’s not service. Promising 24 hour support ought to mean getting support activity around the clock. Not that the $10/hr guard on duty is answering the phones and dispatching you to queue voicemail.

Customers expect a human contact, an agent, a representative of their best interests in a large company. When that is the leading selling point – “the human” – and they don’t get a human to contact them when things go wrong, they get upset. Rightfully so, they bought a human, instead they got a PR junkie that shot a mass mail.

Marketing has to match the deliverable, no way around it.

Compounding the problem is that when our backs are against the wall, we tend to overreact. A few months ago one of our clients patched the box out of existence. The box cycled and was unbootable. Let’s call the guy Allen. Allen opened up the ticket saying his system was down and unbootable and the ticket was marked as urgent. My staff answered the ticket immediately, offering a free reimage and a restore from backup, or if Allen wanted us to work on the box and do a Windows repair, it would be $125.00 per hour for us to pursue the Windows Repair and we’d throw the prayer in for free.

Mind you, this process is there for a very good reason. When people blow up a production server, they want to be back, up and running within minutes. Maybe an hour. So we offer the recovery service for free. If they had something ultra critical that was not backed up, that must be restored to previous condition without reinstall, etc… then we can work on the box on the hourly fee and try everything we can. Business recovery and business continuity are the two different things.

Allen got pissed off. He cancelled both servers, ExchangeDefender, offsite backup, every service he had with us and I’m sure had quite a few four letter words for us too. In such situations, I don’t even bother trying to do any crisis management. We’ve betrayed the clients trust, we messed up, and keeping them on the service list is not a good idea because they just become bashers of your service. “Who do you use? Oh, I use OWN but they suck.”; But Allen was a friend, so I figured, what the heck, let me see if I can do something.

Quick guess, what do you think Allen was pissed off about? That his server went down? That we were going to charge him for the repairs?

Nope.

He was pissed off that the request was answered immediately, and that he was given only two options: reinstall or hourly.

Now, stepping back, ordinarily this guy never would have acted this way. When we see an urgent ticket pop up its equivalent of a five alarm fire – you want me to piss on it or call in the truck? You are down, you opened an urgent ticket – I will give you the best possible scenario I have!

Pretty damn good, that the staff replied right away and gave him the options we considered to be the best. But those were not the options he thought he could count on, he thought those were the only options and he had 0 recourse.

Now, we did give him a KVM, install new hardware, and CD into the system along with the media for the repairs, etc. So we definitely accommodated him, and it took a heck of a lot longer than what it would have taken us to get him back up and running. But that is what our client expected.

And the client is always right.

So when your promises don’t match your clients expectations, no matter how good you are, you “suck” by default.

The only thing that can moderate the “suck” is a human being, but human beings don’t scale and that is why the larger the organization, the less service oriented they become. If you work with a large org and their person moves.. who do you count on? Who do you look to in order to get the message?

There is one company that does this rather well (It’s gonna be cold in hell today) – quick, how many people from Apple do you know that communicate their message? That’s right, Steve Jobs. One guy. One web site. The most impressive marketing campaigns of the last decade.

Something to model I suppose. Or you could sell night guards and janitors answering phones 24/7. Your call 🙂