In May, I had the opportunity to hear Ben Hart, the Senior Director of Customer Loyalty at Rackspace give a keynote. Ben spoke at the Member Insight Exchange for the CXPA at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. CXPA is an acronym for the Customer Experience Professionals Association. It is a group of 2,000+ customer experience professionals. A global non-profit organization positioned to guide and enhance the growing field of customer experience management.
Back to the keynote. Rackspace cares deeply about both its customers and employees. There were a ton of strong takeaways from the session. I would highly recommend that you read a post by Jeannie Walters of 360 Connext for an in-depth examination of the keynote: (Post: Rackspace Gets Fanatical About Customer Experience). You’ll read about “The Jacket,” the Two-Pizza Rule, the Racktivity Room and reducing the impact of “Bouncing.”
The one thing I’d like to highlight from the keynote was a philosophy that Ben shared. He mentioned that Rackspace “pushes the limits” on what they are willing to provide for its customers and its employees (“Rackers”). Rackspace is fanatical to the point of providing added value and service to its customers to the edge of unscalability. For their Rackers, the company pushes the added value and attention to the point of entitlement.
I’ve heard many people question the validity of The Goldfish Rule based on scalability and entitlement. Some people almost provide it as an excuse or a reason to not give beyond what’s expected. I applaud Rackspace for being remark-able and not backing down. I love their mindset of keeping their foot on the pedal. Perhaps its the reason they’ve went from a negative -11 NPS in 1999 to being the leader in managed hosting in 2013. (See: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant)
Today’s Lagniappe (a little something extra thrown in for good measure) – Time to embarrass Big Ben. Ben Hart was a part of the basketball team at Princeton that pulled off one of the greatest upsets in NCAA history (Great short story in Time: Princeton vs. UCLA: Reflections on a Historic Upset). Sorry if you are Bruins fan, but 13th seeded Princeton knocked off the Defending National Champions UCLA in the first round of the Big Dance in 1996. Instead of a glass slipper in this Cinderella story, it was a “backdoor cut”:
