I find this hard to believe-- as a current Rackspace customer (I'd kill to switch) I can say I've had nothing but horrible customer support. Save, one guy named Mark Lessel-- who is a fucking boss (had to give him props).
But I only get to someone like mark, once I've gotten so fed up, I start being an asshole and then, only then, does anything get done (they send Mark to help me). I don't like being an asshole, but spending 3 days going back and forth before getting a resolution is too much.
They've too often had people without technical ability (or it so it seems) attempt to assist me, then blow me off because they don't understand the true nature of the problem.
They say you can "move a slider" and increase the size of your VPS. Which couldn't be further from the truth; more often than not you have to get on the line with their support to figure out why the instance failed to build. Only to drag it out for another 30 minutes telling you to wait; before actually investigating the god damn problem.... Makes scaling quickly very easy (sarcasm).
Rackspace is made even worse by the outright lies about their 'fanatical customer support.' Biggest bullshit marketing lie from a, somewhat respectable, tech company I've seen. If they just advertised middle of the road support and service, I think I'd be less upset. It's just the lies that get to me. Don't over promise and under deliver, that's a bait and switch.
Maybe they should start giving away lipstick with every VPS; so we can all look pretty while we get fucked ;-)
I have to agree with you rubynOObie. My former company was a big Rackspace customer, over 8? years, in their top tier dedicated environment (Intensive or somesuch they called it). I too really wanted to believe in their "Fanatical Support", primarily because we were shelling out $$k+/mo, but there were way too many mistakes on their side to ever believe it. If they couldn't do it with hardware/OS support, why would I believe they could do it with complex application support?
Our relationship became so toxic that they flew me down to SA for some customer appreciation event. Which oddly enough, was about 50% new happy customers, and 50% disgruntled existing customers. And boy was my experience with their support reinforced repeatedly by the others...
Not to mention I went through more than dozen "dedicated" account teams. They were all so earnest at first, but by the time I left, I had basically scripted the conversation for a new account team, pointing out all the custom things on our account and with our configuration that they absolutely couldn't mess with under penalty of death.
Their dedicated pricing is non-competitive these days... I think they rely on the fact that once you're past a certain size, moving to another provider would be so painful that you'll happily pay their ridiculous rates.
In our (Rackspace) defense I will say that we definitely don't rely on a customer getting bigger and being stuck with us as a result due to migration pains. I can demonstrate that logically if you will follow:
Surely this audience is aware of OpenStack and our commitment to such having open source the first major components a few years ago. With such knowledge you can logically assume that we want to be interoperable with other companies' offerings on the same platform.
We really believe in this "fanatical support" thing and we believe we can compete with others on a fair playing field because of it. We do this in part by paying attention:
If our support fails in areas and it's made public in places like this website, trust we are reading about it and discussing it at various levels. Furthermore, we are always striving to get it right. Take that from someone who isn't paid to read this, but paid to write software.
FTR, these are my opinions as someone in the Rackspace culture. Take it for what its worth.
Tell us what we suck at so we can do it better (like you did, drfritznunkie). Thanks.
We are a current rackspace customer and it's been YMMV with them.
We had a particular project that we needed to use the VPS for and noted the page on the SMTP policy. The sales staff were all over us with emails and follow ups but when we posed the question regarding something specific with the SMTP policy (pointing to the particular page) they went silent. No answer, no follow up no reply to our follow ups.
Sent an email to the page that says "if you have any questions write here" and got a link back to that same page (iirc or something literally that worthless).
The lack of follow up (for an important issue) and reply ( to questions) made it a non-starter to use Rackspace for this purpose.
Found it. So in other words we sent an email to abuse@rackspace.com. with a question (per what the page says) and got this auto response:
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED-RESPONSE
Please read carefully! This may be the only response we send you.
Thank you for writing the Rackspace AUP Department. We will make every
effort to investigate all reports of abusive activity in a timely
manner. The information that you have submitted will be used to
investigate the incident for violations of our Acceptable Use Policy,
Racker here and very sorry that you were bounced between groups like this and then still had to try to find the info on your own. It's certainly not the experience that we aim to provide.
If this is still something we can help with, please send details to help@rackspace.com. We'll make sure that this gets to the right Rackers.
We really do believe in offering "Fanatical Support". Mark is a shining example of Rackspace ideals. On behalf of Rackspace, I'd like to offer a sincere apology for your poor experience with us.
I'd like to learn more about your experience with us and figure out how we can improve. Would you mind emailing help@rackspace.com with your details?
Soo... this is another part of my problem, is that in public venues like HN or Twitter you guys boss up getting people to your support site.
However, once on the support site, it falls flat on its face. I am pushed off to one person who doesn't care after another, who doesn't listen or read. I've called 'em out before and that's how I usually get escalated to Mark...
They've got tickets to answer, they're busy, but it's blatantly obvious most of your CS reps goals are not to fix my problem but to get through tickets.
I've done high-end technical support, and I know that people 'believe' in it while they're in the office, talking the talk, but not in their actions. That's your problem, culturally, and publicly, you all say it so many times people believe they're doing it without actually know what it means.
From the outside: you're failing.
Furthermore: I hate being passed off to an account manager cough sales rep cough who kisses my ass when I don't have problems then can't do shit to help me when I do. I don't want a reach around, I want my problems solved. Phone support? A joke. Within 30 seconds of the person on the phone realizing the problem is actually technical, they push you back to the support site.
You guys should signup for a Linode account, file a ticket, and learn from that experience. It's baffling that Linode doesn't boast about its support, like you all, but manages to consistently provide better support resolving my issues quickly without a terrible back and forth.
What Rackspace does for the open source community, and in fighting patent trolls is amazing-- I love that about Rackspace. But certainly not your support.
Sorry to hear we have not lived up to our promise to you. But I can promise you that we are completely focused on providing an amazing customer experience. It seems we have fallen short with you. Could you please email any relevant details to help@rackspace.com so we can investigate?
I find this hard to believe-- as a current Rackspace customer (I'd kill to switch) I can say I've had nothing but horrible customer support. Save, one guy named Mark Lessel-- who is a fucking boss (had to give him props).
But I only get to someone like mark, once I've gotten so fed up, I start being an asshole and then, only then, does anything get done (they send Mark to help me). I don't like being an asshole, but spending 3 days going back and forth before getting a resolution is too much.
They've too often had people without technical ability (or it so it seems) attempt to assist me, then blow me off because they don't understand the true nature of the problem.
They say you can "move a slider" and increase the size of your VPS. Which couldn't be further from the truth; more often than not you have to get on the line with their support to figure out why the instance failed to build. Only to drag it out for another 30 minutes telling you to wait; before actually investigating the god damn problem.... Makes scaling quickly very easy (sarcasm).
Rackspace is made even worse by the outright lies about their 'fanatical customer support.' Biggest bullshit marketing lie from a, somewhat respectable, tech company I've seen. If they just advertised middle of the road support and service, I think I'd be less upset. It's just the lies that get to me. Don't over promise and under deliver, that's a bait and switch.
Maybe they should start giving away lipstick with every VPS; so we can all look pretty while we get fucked ;-)