OK, this post has nothing to do with restaurants, reviews, the product, parties or any of the other good stuff we usually talk about, but I was so impressed that I had to post.
Rackspace hosts our data centre. They are the people that provide and care for all those wonderful boxes that make sure TrustedPlaces is up and running all the time (or 99.9999% of the time). They’re excellent at what they do on a technical level, customer support and all the other areas that you expect a service provider to be really good at. They’re so good that when we had a two hour connectivity problem (that did not affect the live service) they called up and offered a substantial credit to our account – without us asking for it.
On another occasion one of our primary database servers Raid 1 broke. One of the harddrives stopped working and we were flying on a single disk. Rackspace monitoring systems picked up the faulty disk before we did and called us up. We spent 10 minutes on making a full backup (hey, you never know!) and it took them 10 more minutes to replace the disk. That’s about 20 minutes of the server being down because of a broken disk with no data recovery needed!

This time they have blown me away though. Background to the story… Rackspace organised a stock- car racing day for its customers. Great day of fun and really good opportunity to meet people form the industry so I was good to go this Friday.
Then I went a broke my toe and had to cancel. Yes, I can hear all those little violins playing for poor me.
You can imagine my surprise this morning when I opened a padded envelope and found a white , shiny sports car inside, accompanied by the hand-written note below. Absolutely amazing – never had a customer experience like this before.

Now, they didn’t have to do this. Their service is one of the best I’ve come across and I was one happy customer. You can see how it makes sense though. I’m much more than a happy customer now. I am a delighted one and a fanatical evangelist too. When will more companies realise that it makes perfect business sense to go the extra mile and bring back more of a human touch into what they do?

Technorati Tags: Rackspace, TrustedPlaces, Customer Support