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Rackspace Enables 'Fanatical Support' with Zendesk


January 03, 2011
By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor

Behind every excellent set of IT support services is an equally laudable set of enabling solutions. Rackspace, which specializes in managed hosting and cloud computing industry services and is founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform with broad industry support, is a case in point.


Rackspace serves more than 100,000 customers in eight data centers worldwide, integrating what it says is the best technologies for each customer need and delivering it as a service via its award-winning “Fanatical Support.” It backs its managed, e-mail, and cloud hosting solutions with a level of personal service it says is not commonly found in the IT industry.

“We differentiate ourselves by putting customers first across all of our businesses,” explains Blake Yeager, product manager of Rackspace. “When we launched our cloud hosting offering, we wanted to keep this distinction from other vendors by delivering a higher level of support.”

Rackspace’s Rackspace Cloud’s support staff initially handled customer issues via phone, chat and e-mail. The original ticketing system had limited visibility into open cases. The company aimed for a higher level of customer service in its cloud hosting offering.

“Our customers were already very happy with our overall level of service,” says Yeager. “We wanted to take it one step further and give them an interface where they could track their own tickets online, so we began to look for a provider of such solution.”

After researching various ticketing system options, Rackspace found that Zendesk would allow Rackspace Cloud customers to create their own support tickets online and track them in real time -- rather than exchanging e-mails with the support teams. Rackspace launched the solution in August 2009.

“Zendesk makes a world of difference,” says Damian Green, product operations engineer of Rackspace. “It lets our cloud customers see the current status of their tickets, which increases their overall confidence in us. It also feeds us performance reports on how promptly we’re responding to their support needs.”

By offering its customers an additional means of interaction, Rackspace solidified its customer service in improving its customer interaction without devoting more resources. The company even has customers that use Zendesk as their primary means of communication with the Rackspace Cloud support team.

“Many of our customers don’t have time to make a call or interact via chat,” says Yeager. “They appreciate being able to create a ticket and then come back to check on it at their own convenience.”

The Rackspace Cloud support team can now simplify daily tasks by utilizing specific Zendesk capabilities. With Zendesk Triggers, The Rackspace Cloud support team can route tickets to the appropriate departments as soon as they are submitted. Using macros, they deliver familiar responses to common support questions and flag the tickets that agents are already addressing. 

“Our support technicians have given lots of positive feedback about Zendesk,” says Yeager. “Managers appreciate being able to monitor the team’s progress and assess what kind of support experience we’re delivering to our customers.”

By tracking their own tickets online, Rackspace cloud customers can get a clear, accurate status report at any stage in the support cycle.

“We’ll never be able to prevent all IT issues, but Zendesk solution enables our cloud customers to get a ticket status at any moment,” reports Yeager. “This helps us in providing an additional level of interaction with our cloud based customers.”

Green believes that customers who get frequent status updates online can more fully appreciate the level of service Rackspace delivers with its cloud hosting offering.

“With Zendesk, customers can look at a control panel, see a status, and get notified via email whenever an updates occurs throughout the process,” says Green. “This is a huge step forward in showing our customers that when we promise, we walk the talk.”


Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf



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