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LIVING THE SERVICE MANTRA
17
Living The Service
Mantra For Customers
And Community
I NEVER really considered myself a
“techie,” but boy, could I nose out business
opportunities. I launched a variety of
businesses beginning at the tender age
of 13, ranging from selling pork to
livestock photography to, eventually,
real estate and development. Yet there
was a growing force that I simply could
no longer resist: the Internet. Though
comfortably ensconced in my thriving
real estate business, I sensed opportunity
and I wanted “in.” When I encountered
three local Trinity students seeking
funding for an Internet-hosting business,
we banded together and I became the first
investor and cofounder of their fledgling
company, Rackspace.com. Within six
months, I had put my real estate business
on hold and assumed the roles of CEO and
chairman, positions I held until 2006.
A full two decades after we founded
Rackspace, I still enjoy recalling the early
days at the company and describing how
we ended up veering from our initial
concept. At the beginning, I assumed I
would model it after the real estate
industry. Instead of renting apartments,
however, we’d be renting out server space
to customers. Back then, we helped our
Internet Service Provider (ISP) customers
with just about anything and everything,
including fixing computers and networks,
just to generate revenue. But when we
zeroed in on the dedicated-server rental
concept, we chose to focus on that to the
exclusion of everything else. Our ideal
customer was self-sufficient—in the model
of Amazon or Google—where
transactions were made purely online, with
no customer support and virtually no
customer contact of any kind.
To give you an example of how diligently
we stuck to this philosophy, one founder
actually had his email autoresponder
message state his mailbox was full and
divert people to the customer support
number, while his phone message did just
the opposite—refer people to a full
mailbox. In reality, we were not dealing
with this “novice” group of customers at
all, deeming them incongruent with our
desired customer profile. The angry emails
started pouring in, and they were
decidedly not in the form of emotional
rants. Instead, they included logical
arguments supported by details of
customers’ multiple contact attempts and
their resulting frustration.
I grabbed one such relatable email—
remember, I’m not a techie myself—and
showed it to our founders to discuss.
Somehow, generating all this anger
seemed contrary to the principles of good
business management, and the alarm bells
were ringing. If there were so many people
out there wanting to do business with us,
shouldn’t we find some way to
accommodate them—and, of course,
monetize our idea in the process?
company was only nine months old at the
time, and I knew that it was not too late to
change our culture to one of service, with
customer satisfaction as our ultimate
barometer of success. I realize that every
company these days has a mantra of
customer service, but what does it take to
actually make these words a reality?
I called on David Bryce, the most
customer-focused executive of anyone I
knew at the time, to shepherd this change.
He joined the company in 1999 as the vice
president of customer care. Handing me a
book by famed customer service advocate
Leonard Berry, Bryce set the company on
a brand new path, which he called
“fanatical customer support.” In a nutshell,
we did anything and everything to service
our customers, as quickly and as efficiently
as possible. When they called on us for
help, we would be there. Period.
Here are a few examples of how this new
philosophy of fanatical support permeated
every aspect of Rackspace’s corporate
culture:
A REVERSAL TO FORTUNE Commitment to Resolution – No matter
how complex the customer problem, it
always had an “owner,” someone to
coordinate the various support players to
get the job done. No flipping the account
from person to person. The point person
continued to claim ownership throughout
the resolution period, vowing to own the
problem until it was fixed.
We decided to do a complete 180. The Eliminated Fallback Possibilities – We