Switch - Chip Heath [82]
After a few more of these irritating cycles, the customer was furious, and with a bit of legwork he managed to track down Graham Weston at the office of a real estate business he owned. Surprised, Weston asked the customer to forward the e-mails he’d sent and promised to look into the matter.
Weston reviewed the long chain of e-mails, which had become increasingly angry as past inquiries were ignored. “Something hit me about what the customer was asking for,” said Weston. “It was something that we could do very easily that he couldn’t do. So the question in my mind was, why are we not serving the customer happily?”
Weston knew that his team couldn’t sustain a business based on dodging its customers. “We made a 180-degree turn,” he said.
Weston hired David Bryce to be the head of customer support. At his first meeting with the team, Bryce announced that Rackspace was going to transform itself from a company that dreaded customer support to a company that was passionate about support. He posted an aspirational banner on the wall: RACKSPACE GIVES FANATICAL SUPPORT. The phrase stuck immediately.
This was just talk, of course, but there was action to back it up. Weston started by overhauling the company’s business model. Providing great service would cost more, and if Rackspace offered both premium service and cutting-edge technological expertise, it would be forced to set its prices so high that no one would buy. So, remarkably, Weston began pushing for the company to become technologically dull: “We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of technology. We believe in standardization. We want a narrow focus—these are the things we do, and these are things we don’t do. If you’re E*Trade or Amazon, you should host your own site, we can’t help,” he said. (Notice that this is clear direction for the Rider.)
Perhaps the most dramatic change made by Weston and Bryce was also the simplest. Rackspace, like all hosting companies, had a call-queuing system. (“Your call is important to us. Please press 1 for recorded tips that don’t address your problem. Press 5 to leave us a message we won’t return. Press 8 to repeat these options.”) The call queue is perhaps the most basic tool of customer support.
Weston threw it out.
“When a customer calls, that means they need our help, and we’ve got to answer the telephone,” he said. Without the queuing system, there was no safety net. The phone would keep ringing until somebody picked it up. To Weston, this was a critical symbol of the service ethic. “When a customer has a problem, we shouldn’t deal with it when it’s convenient for us. We should deal with it when it’s convenient for the customer.” When Weston threw out the queuing system, it became impossible to dodge the customer. By 2007, the company was talking to an average customer three times per week.
Subsequently, the company launched the “Straightjacket Awards,” including actual Rackspace-branded straightjackets as trophies, which were presented to employees who’d been so fanatical about service that they’d become downright insane. (That’s an identity appeal for the Elephant: We are zealots—that’s what makes us special.) Not coincidentally, in 2008, Rackspace was one of the companies in Fortune’s list of Best Places to Work.
The focus on service paid off. In 2001, Rackspace was the first internet hosting firm to turn a profit, and over the next six years, it averaged 58 percent annual growth. By 2008, Rackspace had passed AT&T as the highest-grossing firm in the industry.
10.
What transformed the character of Rackspace’s customer-service people? Nothing. They had the same core character before and after the change. They were just people operating in a new environment. The old behavior (ignoring customers) had become harder, and the new behavior (serving customers) had become easier.
In this chapter, we’ve seen that what looks like a “character problem” is often correctible when you change the environment. The transformations are stunning. Take a bunch of customer-service slackers and rip out