Two weeks ago, Rackspace, the San Antonio-based IT hosting provider, announced their Fanatical Support Promise.

Sounds like a PR campaign, huh?

Only, it’s not. These folks mean it. As they put it:

“It’s the no excuses, no exceptions, can-do way of thinking that Rackers [Rackspace employees] bring to work every day. Your complete satisfaction is our sole ambition. Anything less is unacceptable. Working hard 24×7x365 to support you is more than our job. It’s who we are. Our driving purpose is to take care of your business, to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. And if for some reason they don’t, you’ll be surprised at the lengths we go to make things right. Any issue you have is quickly taken care of by your own expert Rackspace Support Team, so you’ll never have to worry about it again. Ever.”

Did they just say, “Your complete satisfaction is our sole ambition?” That’s just about the most forceful customer service attitude I’ve ever heard, and I wanted to call it out as an example for anyone else who’s planning on being known for their support. You should steal their idea — but only if you mean it.

This is a great strategy, but they’d better be able to back it up because the long and short of this promise is that Rackspace will break any contract their customers have signed with them if those customers are unhappy. That’s a pretty impressive stance for an IT host. It basically kills the contract, but it extends a big hand to potential customers. It also means they will actually have to perform for you, which is the way I personally like my subscription-based services. I like to be able to cut them off if I’m unhappy. I’m petty like that.

What makes this promise really impressive to me is that it empowers customer service reps to step up and provide authentic help — to do whatever needs doing to get things done. That’s a key detail that most stodgy corporations get very wrong: They prefer their reps to be nameless and faceless and by-the-book. I wasn’t surprised to learn, then, that Rackspace is also on the 2008 list of Money magazine’s 100 best places to work. I also notice that Rackspace recently announced their 4,000th customer. Sounds like they’re doing a heck of a lot right.

Is it possible to actually be this awesomely incredible at customer service? Probably not, but it’s certainly possible to try, and they are apparently willing to try harder than anyone else.

This sounds like more than just customer service to me. It sounds like marketing. Smart marketing.

[Rackspace is on Get Satisfaction.]

My car was broken into last week, just a few days before Christmas. Bah humbug.  

While undeniably sad, it’s not the first time this has happened. It’s become something I expect to occur about once per year. That’s life in the big city, bub. 

The only worthwhile thing missing was my Sirius satellite radio. This having been my third radio lost to a break-in, I knew the drill: call customer service and have them list my radio as stolen. At least no one will be able to get any use out of it. 

I told the Sirius representative that I wasn’t ready to buy a new radio yet, and that I wanted to deactivate the old radio. Surprisingly, he immediately escalated my call to the finance department, ostensibly to mark my account as one that would still let me listen to Sirius programming over the Internet while I mulled over the idea of buying a new radio. 

To my amazement, the finance rep had a deal for me: We’ll ship you a refurbished $150 radio and throw in three months of service for the low, low price of… nothing. 

Did I hear that right? I wasn’t even asking. 

Like other smart businesses that sell subscription-based services, Sirius knows that if I stop subscribing for even a second, it’s a safe bet that I won’t be back. Once I’m gone, I won’t be letting them have access to my credit card every month. Kudos to Sirius for making me reconsider what I was — admittedly — considering: going back to regular old radio (or my old cassette deck — got to get some use out of those boxes of tapes someday!). Double kudos to Sirius for unloading their old inventory through their customer service channel as freebies and incentives to encourage customer retention. Smart. 

Sure enough, when I got off the phone, Sirius had e-mailed me the invoice for my “order.” And sure enough, everything is free, even the shipping. 

I’ve always been a Sirius enthusiast. Now, I’m practically a Sirius evangelist. I admit that I’ve had a few not-so-great customer service experiences with them in the past, but things seem to be getting better. Would I say that if I weren’t waiting for a free radio to show up on my doorstep? Probably not.

How about you? Have any customer service experiences like this? The kind that change your mind about customer service — in a positive way?

[ Sirius is on Satisfaction. ]

Of course, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom for an e-commerce company. After all, customer calls are one of the biggest enemies of ye olde profit margin. In fact, the standard call center thesis may well be “every interaction is a cost to be avoided.” Why would any smart businessperson actually encourage customers to get in touch?

But this is just the beginning for Zappos. Because really, lots of companies display a support number, even if they don’t advertise it like a clearance sale. It’s usually just an invitation to phone tree hell. At Zappos, if you call you’re in for a surprise…starting with zero wait time. More importantly, you’re going to have a warm, personal conversation with someone who knows the finer details of the giant catalog of products. Many customers who’ve been through it say the experience is unlike anything they’ve experienced outside of a family run boutique.

How do they do it? They start by banning all scripts, the building block of a more traditional call center. Because Zappos knows that if they forced their service reps to live by a script they implicitly distrust them to operate without one. Zappos service is anything but automated. As their tagline puts it, they are “Powered by Service.” This commitment means letting their front-line people use their good judgement and–gasp!–their genuine personalities to engage with customers. Phone staff can do and say whatever they need to in the process of delivering satisfaction, whether that means giving away free overnight shipping or reading site content out loud to sight impaired customers.

They elevate the role of customer service to something so valuable that every manager in the company must participate:

…Every new employee that we hire in our corporate office is required to go through 4 weeks of Customer Loyalty training (answering phones in our call center) before starting the actual job that he/she was actually hired for. To us, customer service isn’t just a department — it is the entire company.

Given the incredible leeway they extend to their staff, it’s no wonder that Zappos avoids all the traditional metrics for success. The most important of these metrics is time per call, a number that by the sheer fact of its collection would undermine the mandate to do “whatever it takes” to woo people at all stages of customerhood. Zappos management opts instead for trust, occasionally listening in on calls, but generally focused on the broader measurement of satisfaction (98% positive according to BizRate) and return business.

The result is that Zappos is creating some of the most passionate customers of any online retailer. These customers are incredibly vocal, and the company’s projected 2007 annual sales of $800 million can be credited largely to the word-of-mouth their amazing service inspires. This earns them a seat of honor in our Hall of Fame.

Zappos reminds us that companies that embrace customer interactions create evangelists for their cause. It’s not that reaching this coveted place where engagement and passionate fervor meet is so hard or expensive–it may in fact be the cheaper and easier path in the long run. But as we’ve seen, it does require relinquishing control to the chaos of real human interactions. That is revolution for most companies.

I’ve never liked Plaxo because I found their service to be viral in a bad way; a lot of people ended up sending messages to all their contacts when they didn’t intend to. (One time when a Yahoo employee sent Plaxo invites to every pager & mobile phone in the company directory. At 3am. Nobody would do that on purpose.) About a year ago Plaxo made some moves in the right direction by de-emphasizing the “spam your friends for us” aspects of their service. This sparked a blogstorm, which led to their issuing an apology for ever doing it in the first place.

Hall of Fame
Plaxo makes it into the Hall of Fame for doing the right things to rebuild their reputation after shifting away from their spammy roots. They fixed the problem, apologized, and tried to engage with their customers in a constructive way. They even seek out bloggers who mention them and try to help them out. This is what they did for my friend, and their effort was admirable. A regular employee posted details on the issue and came back to clarify. They offered to waive the fee that sparked the original complaint. One of their VP’s even commented on the Flickr post 7 months later to make sure things were resolved and offer to personally look into the problem. Great service. but…

Hall of Shame
When I first heard that Plaxo had done something sneaky and deceptive I wasn’t surprised. The fact that they had stopped friend-spamming did little to change my feelings about them. They mentioned in the original policy change post that “we’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary.” Essentially they did something that they knew was wrong in order to gain users. Why wouldn’t they do it again to switch users to their premium service?

So I posted a quick comment on Flickr summing up my opinion.

Plaxo is evil. Always has been, always will be.

The Execute Vice President of Plaxo replied:

Um, just saw this and was surprised. Um, we don’t do this. That would be bad. We’re not bad…

If you contact me directly, I would be more than happy to help in any way that we can. -> rikk@plaxo.com (me) or redgee@plaxo.com

And btw, I’m not doing this because you posted an outrageous comment on Flickr.

btw: Jonathan Grubb is evil. Really he is. No, really. Always has been, always will be. (I’ve never met him and really don’t know a thing about him, but I’m sure that he’s evil.)

To me this was more revealing than the blog apologies. I appreciate that the guy has a sense of humor, but this is not the way to keep the customers satisfied. This is the guy runs engineering and operations and he seems genuinely baffled that anyone would think he would do anything bad. Dude, you already admitted to tricking people into sending out millions of emails. He implies that I’m calling his company evil for no reason, that I don’t know a thing about them. Actually I know plenty about them, and I’m keeping away.

I think that you can create an [innovative] environment, and it’s very simple. I think that whoever has power over a budget, and whoever has power over what features are included in a product or go up on the website, they enable innovation by saying “yes.” That’s really the fundamental thing that they have to be willing to do. When someone shows up with an idea — “Hey, why don’t we change the navigation system from this older design to this new design I’ve been thinking of? Can I get some money to go and prototype this?”— all that has to happen is the person with power says, “Yes, I will give you a week to go and prototype that and we will review it when you have the prototype, and then we’ll consider actually making those changes.” And once everyone witnesses the person in power saying “yes” to a new idea, then they’ll be comfortable bringing another idea, or a third idea. And then all of a sudden, you have an environment that is very receptive to new ideas and innovations, as opposed to the more common complaints about environments, where new ideas are like wanted men: They’re shot down pretty quickly.

So much of what drew me to the Web when I first started working on it over a decade ago was the culture of the place. The companies I worked for, just like the Internet itself, were thoroughly and genuinely bottom-up. Good ideas could and did come from the top or the bottom of the hierarchy. Iconoclastic thinking was encouraged, not repressed. Failure was openly acknowledged, even espoused as a goal, not because the people in charge wanted to see you fail but because because being told it was ok to fail made it ok to try.

When I was younger, I didn’t think much about why this was the case. I just loved that my contributions were valued, and that sometimes the company president would stop by my cubicle to ask my advice. Since then I’ve come to recognize this approach as a deliberate management strategy; the creation of a bottom-up culture always begin at the top.

What does this have to do with customer service, you ask? Well, reading that interview got me thinking about another article I’d read about Southwest Airlines, entitled “To Provide the Best Customer Service, Put Customers Second, Says Southwest President Colleen Barrett:”

…[A]t Southwest, to ensure the best customer service, you have to put the customers second. With the “Southwest Model for Leadership,” [Barrett] said, employees are the company’s No. 1 customer.

Barrett, who set up Southwest’s public relations department, spends about 90 percent of her day dealing with employee issues. Her theory, following Southwest’s iconoclastic founder, Herb Kelleher, is that if she can effectively make employees feel good about what they’re doing on a daily basis, satisfied employees will deliver the same sense of friendliness and care to Southwest passengers.

A culture of innovation takes many forms beyond just creating clever new gadgets — turns out this approach makes for better customer service, too. Let your employees live and think the way they want to, let them deal with problems in a way that makes sense to them and to the context of the situation, give them the freedom, the encouragement, and the environment to be themselves — in other words, say “yes” a whole lot — and then watch as that freedom to be themselves is reflected in the way they act and treat others. And in the way that your company succeeds — Southwest has been the most consistently profitable airline in the industry since they launched in 1973.

Another great quote from Barrett:

I don’t understand why an employee should have one personality at work and another outside of work. We do offer you the ability and encourage you to come into the business world as who you are. We hire you for your individuality, and we aren’t going to try to spend six months molding you into corporate culture.

Bottom-up (and out) is a quality I’ve always associated with Silicon Valley and the Internet industry, but we certainly recognize that those kinds of companies don’t always come from the west coast. A big Texas welcome to Southwest Airlines: our 3rd Hall of Famer.

Some useful additional reading: a Businessweek article about Southwest entitled “Customer Service Champs;” Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success; and Southwest’s own weblog, which is how I learned that turbulence isn’t as bad as it seems (though it still freaks me out.)

So I called the Nintendo customer service telephone number, located right there on their web site (you would be surprised how many companies, and especially repair departments, don’t list their phone number on the web). The message telling me I had to wait for a CSR didn’t even finish playing before a rep was on the line. I explained my problem and she said she’d get me an RMA right away to get it fixed.

She asked for my phone number. I gave it to her. She did a bit of a verbal double-take and said, “Are you here in Washington?”

“I’m in Redmond, as a matter of fact [location of Nintendo of America's campus],” I replied.

“Well then, let’s not bother with the RMA and the shipping labels and all of that. Just bring it on in to Nintendo,” she said.

What I love about this is that it’s just common sense, plain and straightforward. Saska lives in the same city as Nintendo’s US headquarters, so of course she should be able to come on over and drop off whatever she need to get fixed. And yet it’s so unusual for a large corporation to do this that it deserves to get called out in our Hall of Fame.

Most of good customer service is about doing the obviously human thing. Most of bad customer service is about abstracting away from the human element, instead focusing entirely on the bottom line and efficiency, “closing tickets” instead of satisfying customers. Not that costs and efficiencies are to be dismissed — obviously not, since they’re critical to business success — but the best companies understand that there’s a very real relationship between how their customers feel and how their numbers look. More companies like Nintendo, please.

Prominent on their site today is CEO David Neeleman not only listing out a series of revisions to their current terms in a “JetBlue Airways Customer’s Bill of Rights,” but also posting a video on YouTube personally apologizing and taking responsibility for what happened.

Here’s the best part:

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that you, your family, friends and colleagues experienced. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel, and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.