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Andrew Nardo is a proud member of the Rackspace Customer Advisory Council. Rackspace is a publicly owned IT hosting company that was founded in 1998 and that trades under the name RAX on the New York Stock Exchange. As a publicly owned company, Rackspace dedicates itself to what it calls “Fanatical Support.” Rackspace wants to provide the best customer service possible to its 250,000 customers and it has over 1,400 trained customer service people answering to customers every day. To fulfill this mission of Fanatical Support, Rackspace relies on something called the Customer Advisory Council. The Council is responsible for surveying customers about their level of satisfaction through the use of focus groups and formal surveys. Andrew Nardo is one of the members of this peer-based support group. The Customer Advisory Council is also a site for networking among leaders in the IT business. What the council is interested in doing is sharing best practices in the field and allowing its customers to learn from each other. Andrew Nardo explains that Rackspace is so committed to this being a non-partisan space that they have an unaffiliated third party lead these meetings. Rackspace expects to come away from these professional gatherings with just as much information as they shared, information that will shape the company’s practices. Rackspace’s Customer Advisory Council is responsible for organizing the customer feedback that they receive in these gatherings into reports that will be used by the Support, Sales, and Foundation groups within the company. It is understood, Andrew Nardo says, that these reports will help Rackspace identify any problems in their business model and help to keep them at the top of their field. In many ways, the Customer Advisory Council exemplifies Rackspace’s mission of Fanatical Support. There are several key aspects to this support system, the first of which is responsiveness. On the part of the Customer Advisory Council, responsiveness consists of listening carefully to the customer base and reporting back to Rackspace so that they can make immediate adjustments to their platform or business model, Andrew Nardo explains. The second component of Fanatical Support is ownership. The Customer Advisory Council shares ownership with Rackspace’s customers, allowing those customers to feel like they are actively taking part in the evolution of the company. Next comes resourcefulness. The Council is eager to take advantage of all the resources that their customers bring before them, says Andrew Nardo. The third party who runs Council meetings helps in this process by asking intensive questions that encourage everyone to look deeper. The final important component in Fanatical Support is transparency. The Council engages in transparency, Andrew Nardo says, in creating their report to share with both the company leadership and the customers who helped them to create it.
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