Thanks to Google’s epic Gmail fail over the weekend, email’s become a hot topic.  It’s a service we often take for granted, having been a communications staple for nearly two decades.  It’s not until we’ve lost our contacts, instructions, correspondence history and saved chats that we realize their importance. As Kirk Averett, director of product for cloud applications at Rackspace quotes, “there’s nothing like not having email to show you how valuable email is.”

We’d been chatting about Rackspace’s hosted email services, hashing out current events as if we were on the set of The View.  From Cisco to Google, we’ve all been remitted a dose of email gratitude.  Backing up the back up is the moral of the story, and it’s one Rackspace knows all about.

“There’s no such thing as 100% up time, and you have to build your business around managing these situations,” Averett explains.  “One thing we get right is that we talk to our customers and listen a lot.  This happens from the top down, and every point in between.  To get things right, we have to take care of the basics.  Because we perform well with the essentials, we’re able to retain those customers.  And they’re our best marketers.”

Let me just pause here to disclose that Rackspace and SiliconAngle do have a working relationship, but this also gives me the authority to say the folks at Rackspace have always been a jolly bunch.  They’ve taken their collaborative mentality to the consumer level, building it into their support system.  Listening is key to Rackspace’s support team, and they carry that through various channels, from phone support to Twitter, live chat or email.

This shapes Rackspace’s goals around customer service, and translates into a form of disaster management, should anything ever compromise their client relationships.  Google’s got more than a few disgruntled users to deal with at the moment, though there’s a lesson tucked in this situation.

“I think this really does establish the absolute critical importance of being transparent when dealing with an issue that affects customers and clients,” Averett remarks.  “It’s a process to get your best and brightest to work together and find a solution.”