Of course, cloud hosting isn’t the only business in which service is paramount. To illustrate, here’s a look at 10 of the top-rated companies in the world — and what would happen without their commitment to customer service.

1. Apple.

The world’s most valuable company might also be one of the world’s most service-oriented, as illustrated by the Genius Bar incorporated into each retail Apple store. Apple’s commitment to service led the company to invest heavily in a retail presence, so that customers could access support from the same place they shop at. This bold move paid off handsomely for Apple and its customers, as its growing market share and surge to becoming the most valuable company in the world after the introduction of retail Apple stores illustrates.

Without the Genius Bar and a customer-centric design philosophy, we’d have poorly designed, ugly computers that are too tough to use — and Apple itself wouldn’t be the revolutionary force it’s become.

2. Virgin.

Virgin is a business that has proven its ability to enter completely unrelated fields — everything from soft drinks to airlines — by focusing primarily on customer service and experience.  ”We deliver the Virgin magic by creating an overall customer experience rather than simply selling a product,” said Richard Branson in a column he penned for Entrepreneur magazine. Specifically, Virgin’s brand values are providing good value for money and providing the ideal customer experience.

Without this customer-centric mentality, its airline would be a whole lot more boring, without attention to a comfortable experience with computer amenities for workers — while operating at the same or even greater cost.

3. UPS.

UPS’ relentless focus on customer service has enabled the firm to earn the trust of its customers most important shipping obligations. Thanks to its online tracking service, call centers, uniformed staff, and responsiveness on social networks like Twitter, UPS can always be in touch with the customer — thus providing a level of service much higher than what you probably get from your local Post Office (which, depending on where you live, might be going broke).

Take away the focus on customer service, and UPS might become a bit more like your local Post Office — offering an experience that is slow and disconnected (meaning senders and recipients alike may not have the option of tracking the package at all times, experiencing greater anxiety) and thus difficult to trust. As shippers of information, Rackspace understand UPS’ strategy; speed and constant customer contact ensure a reliable service that provides customers with the trust and value they need to meet their shipping needs.

4. Nordstrom.

Nordstrom’s customer service goes well above and beyond the call of duty, and has even led to a sort of folklore developing around the company. Consider, for instance, this story that has found its way around the web:

“One legendary story is the ‘tire chains’ story. A man walked into Nordstrom and insisted that he purchased a used set of tire chains there. Without hesitation, the Nordstrom clerk refunded the person’s money out of her own pocket, even though the receipt clearly indicated another store. Then, on her lunch hour, she took the receipt and tire chains to the store where they were from and got her money back.”

Though it may seem foolish for a company to cater to unscrupulous customers, consider the word of mouth advantage — as this blog entry itself illustrates!

Absent this type of service, Nordstrom customers would be less loyal, less satisfied, and not enthusiastic to the point of evangelizing the company.

5. Onstar.

Onstar is a company whose situation and strategy is one closely identified with that of Rackspace. They provide award-winning customer service to customers at mission-critical times — when customers are lost, and potentially at great risk and psychological stress. As such, Onstar focuses on providing 24/7/365 support, with the promise of having a person you can talk to right away — not an automated teller system. They know that in their business, providing constant contact with customers is essential. At Rackspace, the story is the same; customers are at great risk and stress if they are disconnected from their information systems, and the reason support is available 24/7/365 to manage that risk.

6. Trader Joe’s.

When it comes to customer responsiveness, it’s tough to beat Trader Joe’s. A report of Trader Joe’s customer service by Fast Company showed that the company’s focus on letting its employees make decisions and respond to customer needs was their secret, observing that store supervisors spend most of their day on the retail floor were provided with a lot of autonomy to set up their stores to meet local needs — while employees can open any product a customer wants to taste and are encouraged both to recommend products they like and to be honest about items they don’t.

Without this type of customer responsiveness, Trader Joe’s might be Trader Slows.

7. Lexus.

Car manufacturer Lexus has repeatedly reaped praise for its customer service; consumer review group J.D. Power and Associates conducted a study in which Lexus earned the highest marks regarding the level of satisfaction of customers “who visit a service department for maintenance or repair work” within the first three years of owning a vehicle.

Without customer support, Lexus would not have the customer satisfaction and trust from it’s customers to have built their world recognized and respected brand.

8. Zappos.

Online retailer Zappos has made a name for itself by combining weirdness, family values, and outstanding customer service; the company even dedicates a sizable, prominent portion of its website toward explaining its culture and values to its customers. All of this results in a degree of trust that yields satisfied, repeat customers.

If the company removed its customer service component — but kept its weirdness and family values — it would be more like a creepy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner than a retailer with legions of customers that keep coming back, telling their friends along the way.

9. Four Seasons.

A 2010 report conducted by Business Week in its search great customer service companies listed Four Seasons as one of the best service organizations in the world. The reason? The company focused on developing a cross-functional staff; for instance, employees were trained not only in managing the front desk but also in understanding amenities like spa work. Basically, Four Seasons focused on turning its employees into real-life versions of MacGyver!

Without this type of customer service, the Four Seasons experience would likely be more boring and likely frustrating.

10. Best Buy.

A Harvard Business Review study seeking to explore the secret to Best Buy’s success — and why it has displaced other electronics retailers like Circuit City — concluded that the primary factor was the company’s focus on creating a customer-centric enterprise. From the study:

Best Buy took the time to understand who its customers are and what they need and then started selling solutions instead of products. As part of its research, for example, Best Buy discovered that 55 percent of its customers were women, and that for the most part they loathed their shopping experience at the retailer. Men look for a specific product at a discount price. Women want not just a digital camera, but a printer, cable, and other accessories–and they care far more about these things than price. Equally important, they want help with installation, while most men prefer to try to put things together themselves.

Taking the time to understand their customers, and building them personalized solutions, is a formula that yielded success for Best Buy — and is a formula that Rackspace is familiar with via the Managed Cloud offering. Take out the customer service and the customer-centric mindset of the entire enterprise, and you’re left with a company that sells products instead of solutions.

As these companies illustrate, quality customer service is in many ways the ultimate win-win, as it generates long-term relationships between customers and service providers. And it is this belief that guides the Rackspace team.

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Simit Patel is a trader, writer, and technology entrepreneur. Simit blogs via Contently.com. This is a guest post and the opinions of the author may not reflect those of Rackspace.

The Cloud.

Specifically, here are 10 ways the cloud has changed the way business is done:

1. Push Prices Down

At its core, the cloud is a cost-saving technology: it enables data to be more easily shared, which in turn allows resources to be allocated more efficiently (companies like AirBnb or GetAround are examples of services that use cloud technologies to push prices down and improve allocation of assets). Most notably, a study conducted by the London School of Economics concluded that cloud computing makes it easier and cheaper to innovate. Cost reduction enables many other transformations, such as…

2. Greater Entrepreneurship

Just as clouds have enabled businesses to dramatically lower their cost of operations, they have by extension lowered the cost of starting a business — and thus spurred entrepreneurship. And thanks to cloud technologies and the degree of data sharing they enable, independent businesses can share their collective infrastructure costs via the cloud. Rackspace, is using our cloud technology to promote entrepreneurship via their Startup Program.

3. Small Business Partnerships

Of course, the cloud doesn’t just dramatically reduce the costs of starting a business — it also reduces the cost and difficulty of partnering with other businesses by making it easier to use APIs of other applications. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, has said that APIs enable a new form of business development for small businesses that makes meaningful collaboration more possible for all organizations, big and small.

4. Build a Modular Organization

Running parallel to the idea that cloud technologies facilitate small business partnerships is that they enable larger companies to create a modular organization. Prabhakar Gopalan notes that this is a manifestation of Conway’s Law, in that modular communication systems built on cloud technologies will ultimately yield modular organizations as well. Basically, cloud technology enables better participation across small teams — which in turn enables organizations to be less hierarchical and more modular, which reduces the organization’s risk against collapse of any single department of its unit.

5. Reduce Technical Barriers

Consistent with the basic theme that cloud technologies enable sharing is that they also, by extension, enable collaboration and specialization. As such, cloud technologies enable non-technical individuals to participate in and lead information systems. This is especially a focus of ours at Rackspace, and hence why we made our mission to bring fanatical support to the cloud technologies that we provide.

6. Facilitate International Business

To put it simply, the cloud makes it easier to share data. This makes it easier for the same data to get to computers all over the world faster than ever before, which in turn makes international business easier. Take for example, Rackspace Cloud Files and it’s built-in CDN using the Akamai technology. End users can access your web content faster by retrieving data cached content from servers closest to them, rather than from the origin.

7. Work on All Computing Devices

Thanks to the cloud, businesses can more easily reach their customer regardless of what computing device they are using. Clouds enable an organization ‘s offerings to be re-packaged and customized via APIs by independent third parties with their own audience, and for an organization’s own workforce to collaborate more easily regardless of how they are connecting to the Internet. And so we organizations are transforming into …

8. Mobile Workforces

Because the cloud enables greater collaboration on any computing device from anywhere in the world, it is leading us to a world characterized by a mobile workforce: business travel for building deeper bonds based on the loose bonds created by cloud-based collaboration is becoming more common.

9. Always On

And so, because the cloud enables a workforce that is international, mobile, and accessible, it is always “on.” (Although the Cloud never sleeps, every provider has their own SLA).

10. The Learning Organization

The cloud is also enabling organizations to transform themselves into learning centers that create a workforce more educated and informed than ever before.

“The most significant benefits of cloud-based learning are that it enables accessibility from multiple devices (e.g., computer, tablet, smart phone) and allows for both formal and informal learning with a wide network of individuals, one that is not limited to a specific institution,” writes Marci Paino of Clomedia.

The cloud enables greater productivity and efficiency than ever before. That’s how it’s become an essential technology that’s transformed our world.

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Simit Patel is a trader, writer, and technology entrepreneur. Simit blogs via Contently.com.  This is a guest post and the opinions of the author may not reflect those of Rackspace.

But while cloud hosting has pushed the cost of running an Internet business down dramatically, it has created other challenges — namely the high-levels of expertise needed to seamlessly run cloud technologies. This is the primary focus of our operations at Rackspace: delivering a quality luxury service, which we refer to as Fanatical Support, to our customers.

“Our service is designed to be like a personalized IT department for our customers,” said Joseph Palumbo, Rackspace Cloud Lead for Managed Cloud. “Our managed plans start at under $200 a month and have 24x7x365 IT support, involving everything but software development, customized in accordance with the customer’s strategic direction.”

Palumbo’s last point is crucial.

Luxury cloud service means more than just a high level of service; for organizations, it means having a hosting provider who can adapt with you — which in turn can avoid many hassles and reduce costs down the road.

“Cloud computing involves complex relationships with numerous legal and marketplace realities,” said speaker Gerard M. Stegmaier, an attorney with technology business law firm Wilson Sonsini.

With so many complexities in the cloud, luxury management can provide a personalized solution can help firms navigate the dizzying morass of data ownership and rights in the cloud. With true luxury hosting services, organizations simply need to express their goals — in other words, play the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) — to their cloud hosting provider, who will then be responsible for building and managing the IT solution most appropriate for these goals.

As for the future of luxury cloud services, look for cloud hosting providers to find opportunities for opportunities for their customers to build meaningful relationships with each other. Cloud providers are in a unique position to help companies dealing with any of the myriad of challenges related to business in the cloud — from nurturing an ecosystem of developers to navigating digital rights issues and more. As such, the high touch, quality service associated with luxury may come to be known as an essential bargain for organizations looking to outsource their networking needs to trusted specialists.

To learn more about Cloud Servers with a Managed Service Level, click here.

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Simit Patel is a trader, writer, and technology entrepreneur. Simit blogs via Contently.com. This is a guest post and the opinions of the author may not reflect those of Rackspace.

The biggest economic impact the Internet has had thus far is in enabling a greater degree of data-driven decision-making, which has been shown to increase productivity.

The result? Companies heavily invested in the infrastructure for Internet-based data transmission and storage  – like Rackspace — can leverage an abundance of data to design businesses processes with an unprecedented amount of efficiency, the result of which is innovations that translate to greater profits for technology companies and lower costs for consumers. The ultimate win-win.

That’s the basic story, but for technology companies, the challenge remains: how can firms leverage the data they have to create greater efficiencies within their respective organizations?

Here’s a road map to help with conquering that challenge:

1. Know Thyself.

The ancient Greek aphorism isn’t just for philosophers and mystics — it’s for technology businesses as well. Specifically, knowing thyself means two things: knowing the mission of the company and knowing its core competences — what the organization is designed to do.

For instance at Rackspace, our mission guides us to offer high quality services enabled at helping each of our customers solve their unique data challenges, and ensuring our team members are capable of delivering that high quality service.

By having a deep understanding of its mission and its core competence, upper management is positioned to understand what type of data they will have and how they can use it. Which leads to the next step….

2. Property Rights.

Understanding the mission statement and organizational capabilities can help firms craft information rights policies consistent with their operational strategies.

Property rights pertaining to information in the cloud is a major issue in cloud computing and the whole “big data” frontier; accordingly, companies may benefit from ensuring that managers across all major departments understand how the firm views property rights to the information it accesses.

Getting the legal team involved early on to ensure the strategy is legally sound may also be a prudent form of planning — see Digital Inspiration’s blog entry on laws and the cloud for an introduction to the intersection between big data and the law.

3. Ensure Data Operability.

Once the organizational context and property rights policies are clearly understood, the next step is to ensure the technical architecture of the cloud enables all data to be easily aggregated and re-mixed.

The burden here typically lies on the Chief Technology Officer or Product Managers within the respective firm; basically those who outline the vision of the applications that firms use to gather data and create their clouds will benefit from ensuring that their applications are built on the same technical standards.

It is with this in mind that many large technology companies have called for a formalization of cloud computing standards, and projects like OpenStack have started to gain traction.

4. Creating Feedback Loops.

After upper management establishes the vision, the legal team approves, and technologists identify which applications are best for creating an infrastructure capable of leveraging big data/cloud computing, the stage is set for feedback loops to be created.

In other words, data can be queried and experiments against this data can be conducted. Most seasoned Internet marketers will be familiar with the concept of A/B testing, which allows marketers to conduct experiments and examine the data results.

If the cloud computing infrastructure has been set up properly, a system will be in place to collect a wide variety of data and easily create experiments to see how changes in the business affect sales, marketing, costs, and virtually any dimension the business wishes to make more efficient.

Companies that can create feedback loops based atop a cloud infrastructure designed specifically for their business are well-positioned to use all the data at their disposal to increase their efficiency/productivity — a win-win for all involved, save competitors.