For my domain email needs I use Rackspace and, for the most part, have been happy. Over the past several months though, I have had issues with their webmail freezing when using Chrome on my Windows 7 work machine. Because I only use webmail to check and purge spam, I never really decided to do anything about it. That was until this week.
Earlier this week my payment to Rackspace did not go through. Curious as to why this is the case, I logged into the control panel and started a live chat with one of their support representatives. Because it was a billing issue, they suggested I email their billing department as they couldn’t help me. This type of thing is frustrating, but common with most companies. Since I had support on live chat I decided to inquire about Google Chrome support. I opened a ticket the previous day about this issue but had not heard back from anyone. Over 24 hours to reply to a ticket is not the type of support I was used to. On the live chat, I was told that Chrome wasn’t officially supported. This kind of shocked me. Chrome is now the #3 browser and is already at version 10. It’s hardly a beta product. It should be something that they support. I was left kind of disappointed.
Since I got my answer to my ticket in live chat, I went in and closed the ticket I had opened. When closing it you get to rate the helpfulness of support. Since no one bothered to reply to the ticket, I gave it the lowest rating possible; a 0 out of 5. I did have to go out of my way to get an answer to an already submitted ticket, after all. Within an hour of closing the ticket I receive a call from an unrecognizable number. It happened to be Rackspace. They wanted to make sure I was satisfied and apologized for my dissatisfaction with the ticket I had opened. They gave me correct information about Chrome (it’s a problem with Chrome and Windows 7 when you have new email sound notification enabled, it freezes the browser) and apologized for not responding to the ticket and making me seek support from the live chat.
Needless to say, what started out as a bad customer experience turned out to be a good one. Rackspace knew I was dissatisfied and they made up for it. After rating tickets and surveys and performance with just about every company that asks for them, I honestly was not expecting anything to come from that low rating. Nothing ever does. To my surprise, Rackspace did. It shows they are willing to go the extra mile to make sure they have happy customers.
Kudos Rackspace.
