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No joke, they took away our ability to use chat support a few months ago. Why? Because we're such an important client, that they want us to have a more persona

No joke, they took away our ability to use chat support a few months ago. Why? Because we're such an important client, that they want us to have a more personal relationship, by forcing us to interact over the phone. I wish I were kidding.

dpcan 12y ago
This freaks me out. Live Chat is my life-blood, especially given my schedule and number of clients. Particularly regarding issues with my Sites customers.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat. Rackspace has folks that know how to fix a complicated issue on RHEL stack at 3am, which is nice. And, unlike a cheap host who has an SLA that guarantees 100% uptime but only refunds you for time lost, Rackspace's SLA incentivizes them to fix things ASAP. Things like a dedicated box having a hardware failure will be restored in an hour and they credit you 5% of your monthly fee for every hour over that. Or 5% for each 30 minutes of downtime due to data center issues (power, network, HVAC, etc). And they do make good on it.
  - imsofuture 12y ago
    Chat support is extremely helpful when it comes to minor issues. Sure, if there's a core networking issue in the datacenter that's strangely impacting my servers I want to be on the phone with a well-informed tech. Rackers are a smart bunch, their first-level chat support is great for the million minor issues I need solved. ("We've got a noisy neighbor, can you check it out?", "Can you move this VM to a new host?", etc.) That's 10 seconds of divided attention required from me vs 10 minutes of dedicated attention for a phone call.
bobfunk 12y ago
Same happened to us. Took away live chat around the same time.

dpcan 12y ago

This freaks me out. Live Chat is my life-blood, especially given my schedule and number of clients. Particularly regarding issues with my Sites customers.

JohnTHaller 12y ago
It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat. Rackspace has folks that know how to fix a complicated issue on RHEL stack at 3am, which is nice. And, unlike a cheap host who has an SLA that guarantees 100% uptime but only refunds you for time lost, Rackspace's SLA incentivizes them to fix things ASAP. Things like a dedicated box having a hardware failure will be restored in an hour and they credit you 5% of your monthly fee for every hour over that. Or 5% for each 30 minutes of downtime due to data center issues (power, network, HVAC, etc). And they do make good on it.
- imsofuture 12y ago
  Chat support is extremely helpful when it comes to minor issues. Sure, if there's a core networking issue in the datacenter that's strangely impacting my servers I want to be on the phone with a well-informed tech. Rackers are a smart bunch, their first-level chat support is great for the million minor issues I need solved. ("We've got a noisy neighbor, can you check it out?", "Can you move this VM to a new host?", etc.) That's 10 seconds of divided attention required from me vs 10 minutes of dedicated attention for a phone call.

bobfunk 12y ago

Same happened to us. Took away live chat around the same time.