Company: Rackspace, San Antonio, TX
Company Description: Rackspace® is the #1 managed cloud company. Founded in 1998 by three Trinity University classmates, Rackspace has now become a global company with more than 200,000 customers in 120 countries and $1.5 billion in annual revenue. While our headquarters remain in San Antonio, we have over 5,700 Rackers on four continents. We are a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: IVR or Web Service Solution – New

Nomination Title: Rackspace's Cloud Control Panel Support Drawer

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date:

TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

At the end 2013, Rackspace identified a gap in how we delivered Fanatical Support to our Cloud customers. We had traditionally prided ourselves in human touch as the definition of the word Fanatical. However, customer feedback informed us that for customers living in the “smartphone era” human touch alone was not enough. We needed a world-class digital experience to remain Fanatical.

Rackspace had existing support websites including our Knowledge Center and Community to help answer customer questions. However, we knew customers were not finding the information they needed from these sites. Data analysis showed that Cloud Support Engineers were still answering common questions multiple times a day. NPS responses also highlighted customers were frustrated at having to engage support for simple questions.

To drive a cohesive digital customer experience, Rackspace’s Cloud Support and Self-Service Product teams partnered to reinvent how customers consumed support through digital support properties. The Rackspace team identified integrating all properties driving digital support via one Support Network as a crucial step. This integration would include a unified search against the content in the Knowledge Center, Community, and API documents, and embedding a new application within the Cloud Control Panel to allow for interacting with those sites.

After months of hard work, the team released an improvement in the Cloud Control panel to a pilot set of customers in the Managed Infrastructure service level. This improvement was a feature that replaced the previous calls to action for support engagement with an interactive pop-out (“Support Drawer”). When opened, the Support Drawer would allow for customers to search against our Support Network documentation to find the answer to their question without needing to go to those sites individually. Customers still had access to our traditional support channels (phone, ticket, and chat) if they wanted to engage a Cloud Support Engineer directly. Rackspace also provided more guidance on when to use the traditional channels to help customers chose the most effective path for getting their issue resolved.

Upon release, the pilot’s results were astounding! The integrated search feature improved the usage of the self-service channel, resulting in a decrease in chat and phone support volume from this pilot group. Rackspace also saw a substantial increase in customers choosing to engage the Rackspace Community as a way to get the answer to their question. To help ensure Fanatical delivery in the Community, the team was reorganized to include Technical Community Managers capable of directly answering tough customer questions in set time periods.

To help understand customer adoption before the full launch, the Product team performed extensive user experience interviews on the recent changes. We found opportunities for improvement and implemented those items, such as the suggested content being recommended in the "Getting Started” and “How do I…” sections of the Support Drawer. With the help of our content strategists and user experience designers, we streamlined the layout of the Support Drawer, changed the links being presented in those sections to improve their usefulness, and added two new sections, “Case Studies” and “Reference Architectures”. This “version 2” design was piloted against the existing version of the Support Drawer. Cloud Support saw another improvement in direct Knowledge Center engagement from the changes, which prompted us to roll out this version as the default version to the entire Managed Infrastructure Cloud service level.

The continued success of the Support Drawer in allowing Managed Infrastructure customers to find their own answers convinced support leaders from around Rackspace that this feature could benefit their customers too. On October 29th, the Rackspace Self-Service Product Team deployed the Support Drawer globally to all Cloud accounts. This project will continue to make improvements in the platform and in self-service opportunities for our customers. It’s already enabled a Click-to-Call pilot and is helping us cement the path for predictive analytics based on support behavior.

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