The article in question tackles the main forms and types of support organization in hosting companies, as well as main problems hosts may face going for the outsourced support.
When people buy hosting, most of them pay for support, thus support is becoming the most importing feature of the hosting package. Services, uptime, bandwidth, storage and add-ons are also essential, but all the polls show great demand for quality support. And what actually sets one hosting company apart from the other is the level of hosting services they provide, how quickly they respond to tickets, the efficiency of help they provide on every query.
This article is the attempt to summarize all forms of support used in hosting companies and the major issues arising while supporting hosting clients. We do hope to make it interesting both for hosts and hosting customers.
As for organization of support, hosts have few options to go for; the most common one is to organize in-house support that is to hire a team of computer technicians (network administrators) to deal with customers queries 24/7 or to outsource support from the third-party either another hosting company or , more often, a professional server management company. Sometimes a combination of in-house and remote teams is used. Round the clock support and better expertise at lower costs are driving web hosts to consider outsourcing at least part of their support.
If you decide to go for the third-party support consider the following tips:
1. You can’t have remote techs you hire under your direct physical supervision, and the company you outsource from may be hiring students or just people with no qualification to save money.
So, it’s always safer to ask about the Engineering degree of the staff if you outsource. Engineers have a reservoir of talent pool around them, and as a result arrive at faster and better resolutions.
2. Always ask about the collective experience of the remote staff and the average experience of every member, as the high level of collective expertise helps to anticipate any kind of problem the server may face simply by studying the way it’s set up, and the kind of customers on it.
3. Ask the company for the certification to back up the quality of services they provide.
4. Always make sure the company has more than one bandwidth provider, power backup and 99.9% uptime.
5. Talk to the support staff and see if they understand you and if you understand you without repeating much of the time, if not, the chances are that your clients will have the same problems.
Dealing with newbie clients is one of the problems that hosting companies may face. Depending on the type of packages a hosting company offers such customers may submit a considerable amount of tickets and create tension on work of support. One of the effective ways out is to create knowledgebase tutorials, or send them to the community forum you have on your site. Sometimes hosting companies cooperate with web design companies and send newbies with questions to them, this being a very profitable form of partnership, as designers send them their clients to get hosting services.
One more issue, close to the one above, yet slightly different is abusing support by sending in continuous tickets to resolve problems not always connected configuration. In this case more support staff time is taken than it should be provided by the hosting package. Those who experienced that have come up with different solutions, like establishing monthly ticket limit per customer, extra charging for configuration issues, including lines like “Excessive support requests may attract a $5 per ticket” into their TOS, or simply increasing the price of hosting services.
There are some other nuances here, and we hope to get back to support topics in our next article.
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