Every day, Rackers have the opportunity to receive customer feedback: from day-to-day service interactions to responses received from our NPS surveys. Feedback comes in many forms and through a variety of channels. As a part of our culture, we work diligently to listen and constantly improve for our customers – to provide them the “Fanatical Support” experience we have committed to as an organization.
In addition to the daily feedback that we receive from customers, Rackspace also seeks feedback in a more formalized, programmatic way. We gather a select group of customers from across the business to participate in what we refer to as The Rackspace Customer Advisory Council.
The Customer Advisory Council (CAC) was put in place to provide customers from all parts of the business an opportunity to interact with Rackspace on a much different level. This includes NPS promoters, passives and detractors so that we get a fuller spectrum of opinions. Customers have the opportunity to share openly – with their peers – what they like, dislike, their best practices and frustrations about doing business with us.
Participants have an opportunity to learn from other IT business leaders, educate themselves on trends and ‘network’ with like-titled professionals. All conversations occur with little Rackspace fanfare, and are led by a third-party facilitator who digs deeper for detail.
For Rackspace, the result is an invaluable output of unfiltered perspectives about how to take Fanatical Support to the next level. Adding this data to transactional feedback from customers, and our own internal perspectives, we create a plan of attack. We also utilize the feedback to reinforce and/or challenge our current lines of thinking and approaches to particular business problems.
Our 2010-2011 Customer Advisory Council kicked off two weeks ago at the Contessa Hotel in San Antonio. The customers involved were excited to participate and expressed a great deal of value drawn from 2-plus days with Rackspace and customer-peers.
The CAC commitment will continue for these customers through 2011 and their feedback will be leveraged by Support, Sales, Foundation and the One Rackspace effort. We will continue to leverage their advice via gatherings and calls over a 12-month period, until it is again time to nominate a new CAC in the fall of 2011.
There are many ways that we take Fanatical Support seriously within Rackspace. As someone who may be considering a career with us, I hope this helps you understand more about the extent of our commitment.
Darrin Hanson is the Vice President of Intensive Support at Rackspace, responsible for Fanatical Support to over 1,000 customers.
Prior to this role, Darrin spent 2+ years leading Infrastructure Services at Rackspace. This team was responsible for infrastructure and customer escalation support. Technologies included Storage, Managed Backup, Virtualization, Monitoring Systems, Segment Support and Database Services (among other technology and operations functions).
