Voice of the Client: Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud

We all know you can get more things done if you know the right people. Once you become a Rackspace customer, we aim to provide the best customer experience in the world — and that begins with giving you the best access to contacts inside Rackspace.

In this post, we’ll walk through some of those contacts, so you can easily escalate any issue, small or large, and make sure it gets resolved as quickly as possible.

Operating a cloud is complex, and customer issues at Rackspace are handled in a couple of ways. I’ll first point out that if you’re hosting an environment at Rackspace and you have an emergency with your services, you can call the support number at 800.961.4454. That’s the quickest path to solving something really troublesome.

Besides the emergencies, you need another way to address ongoing issues. You might have billing/invoice questions. You might have questions about emerging capabilities. You might have problems yet to be defined, that still need solutions. That’s where the Account Development Manager (ADM) comes in.

Every OpenStack Private Cloud customer at Rackspace has an assigned ADM, like me, to serve as their voice inside Rackspace. Once you’ve become a Rackspace customer, your ADM advocates for you, ensures follow-through and works on your behalf to guarantee great outcomes.

Your ADM also has the experience to listen to what you need, follow through with requests and engage the right Rackspace resources. The ADM can set up weekly or monthly meetings with a client to review cloud operations, give OpenStack recommendations and receive feedback.

Let’s explore an example. I have a weekly call with one of my clients called “Build the Cloud.” In that call, we discuss OpenStack recommendations based on our operational expertise and address trends that we identified from support tickets and client feedback.

This particular client signed up for access to one of our dedicated Rackspace OpenStack architects, who makes recommendations based on the client’s specific OpenStack clouds. Recommendations range from OpenStack upgrade methods to secure access methods to migrating networks from VXLAN to VLAN. Once a plan is reviewed and agreed upon, Rackspace operators can write up maintenance plans, review them with the client and schedule the work for a specific time.

It’s also worth noting that the ADM is the customer advocate with Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud leadership. Each week, everyone in the OpenStack Private Cloud department is invited to attend a customer health meeting, which is an open forum for anyone to voice issues a client is having.

These meetings always result in new insights and often end with the creation of an action item which is assigned an owner, and tracked and followed up on in subsequent customer health meetings. Rackspace is known for Fanatical Support and a tangible example of this is following up and solving identified issues. Without the ADM working with clients on a daily basis, reviewing support tickets or participating in customer health meetings, some of these issues may not have been identified or voiced.

The ADM at Rackspace is just one of the operational layers we have to help run your cloud. Rackspace is known as an extension of our customer’s IT team, so customers leverage us as needed.

If you’re not a client today and want to learn more about whether OpenStack Private Cloud as a service might be a good fit for your organization, take advantage of a free strategy session with a private cloud expert — no strings attached. SIGN UP NOW.