The Perfect Support
Hosting Support - An Introduction
Imagine yourself as a person running a small-medium sized
online store that concentrates on affordablly prized gift
items, and say, it's Christmas time. Everybody is on a shopping
spree, and you have been waiting for this vacation to arrive,
as it is the time of the year when your business really
blooms, and with which's revenues you have got to plan for
the year to come.
Say, your site goes down due to some sort of problems associated
with your server on say, the 23rd of December, or on Christmas
eve. You will be contacting your hosting company in frenzy,
and just imagine if there's nobody there to provide you
with prompt support and resolution for your issue.By the
time boxing day arrives, nobody will need to send gifts
anymore to anyone. You have lost your business, and now
your site and business has got a notorious reputation of
not being active when it counts.
The above is just a worse case scenario explained to put
forward a point. Quality support is the backbone of a hosting
company. It is the pillar on which a hosting firm rests
it's credibility. Speedy and accurate customer service is
rare and indicates a superior overall hosting service. When
choosing a web host, what customers generally look for are
Server performance, Space, Traffic allowed, Features, Cost,
and most importantly Customer support.
If a hosting company is one which takes it's business seriosly,
their technical support must be perfect by all means. Determining
whether technical support is dependable is important, because
if anything goes wrong with your site, you are going to
be contacting your know-it-all customer care rep. However,
in the real world, we know that knowledgeable customer care
is hard to find.
Most of the hosting companies claim that they have techs
working round the clock in their organizations, managing
their state-of-the art systems. While this in fact may be
true, sometimes, the people working with the support might
be the most unprofessional and underqualified ones. Due
to the huge demand for information technology professionals
today, many web hosts are not able to find employees who
are well trained in OS concepts, network technology and
control panel specifications. Other firms pump in a lot
of money to advertising and marketing and gives good quality
customer support only the lowest priority. In both instances,
it is the customers who eventually suffers due to the lack
of competence in handling their issues related to hosting.
The following is a small article gives a brief insight
into the hosting support considerations for the newbies
in business, as well as any host who have got high regards
for the quality standards of their company. Before proceeding,
please keep in mind the fact that Web Hosting Support is
not child's play. It is something that is NOT to be taken
for granted.
Finding the Right Support for you
Finding the perfect support for your company is not a very
easy task. Every webhost who have got serious thoughts about
their hosting support would be having certain expectation
levels regarding the quality of support. Only if your support
matches / outperforms your expectations would you feel relaxed,
relieved and be happy with them.
The very first concern regarding support is how to keep
things going 24 / 7. Every webhost provides their customers
with a 24 / 7 support promise, and some even give their
customers a money back guarantee on any failure to keep
up the promise. You should be implementing methods to ensure
that your support team covers the 24 hours of the day effectively,
and co-ordinate between them regarding the technical and
administrative aspects of your servers.
Then comes the cost part. There are options for maintaining
an inhouse team of technical experts, or outsourcing to
an outsourced hosting support company. You should choose
your support wisely with efficient computations of your
expenditure and profit margin. You should do it in such
a way that the quality of support is not compromised, and
at the same time you have the decent profit to enhance your
business in the long run. Please note that in the very beginning
itself, you should set the standards, and should never go
below them. Remember - It's a jungle out there, with huge
competition. If you have to survive, you have to be the
best; and to be the best, you have got to give your customers
the best. Manage high standards.... returns would come automatically.
Web hosting support not only means providing technical
solutions to your end customers; but the sales / billing
support and timely administration of your servers are equally
important. You can manage the sales / billing issues yourself,
or you can avail the aid of a graduate with good customer
skills, and excellent knowledge on the packages / features
/ options that you provides. Regarding the server administration,
you require the service of a good system administrator to
perform the timely software upgrades, and the other fine
tuning aspects of the server for it's smooth functioning.
It is always an additional advantage to maintain a team
of technical experts who can perform your technical support
as well as server administration; rather than having separate
teams for the same. It would reduce the overall costs involved,
and will enhance quality of customer support due to the
better knowledge of the servers.
In-House or Outsourced??
Now comes the big question. Do you need an in-house team
of technicians, or do you want to outsource your support
to a support company? There has been disputes over this
on most of the web hosting forums. Both the options has
got advantages and disadvantages. But on tallying with the
positive and negative sides of both of them, my vote goes
to outsourced support. A comparison of the advantages is
provided in the chart below:
ADVANTAGES
In-House
1) Direct interaction with the support staff in person
2) Direct recruitment of the support staff yourself, so
as to meet your ideal requirements on first-hand
3) Local market knowledge and expertise when it comes to
sales and marketing
4) Ready availability-upon-call of your in house team in
case of any emergency
Outsourced
1) Far cheaper than what is required to maintain an inhouse
support team
2) You can concentrate on your business marketing, while
the outsource company takes care of the technical side.
3) Expertise in specific fields related to every server
software.
4) No hassles with the planning of shifts or personnel
to manage the 24 / 7 support, as it is taken care of by
the outsource company.
5) No issues associated with training the support staff.
Outsource companies are able to provide you with high quality,
but cheap support due to the low cost of living standards
in those countries. Most of the hosting companies are located
in the United States, Canada and Europe, and the major outsource
companies are located in countries like India. Due to the
comparatively lower cost of living in countries like India,
the above is made possible. With inhouse support, you have
to pay the wages that is par with the living standards in
the United States and such; which makes it an expensive
option.
There are several myths related to outsourcing jobs. According
to the trade and foreign aid research conducted by The Heritage
Foundation , the American economy has only benefitted from
outsourcing jobs to the asian countries, and has not gone
down, as the general concept is.
But with outsourced support, you have got to make the right
choice. Due to the huge demand for professionals in the
ITES ( Information Technology Enables Services ), many webhosts
can't find employees with expertise in the relevant fields.
You should be doing a research on the work culture and standards
of the different outsourced companies before making the
right source. A search for the leading outsourced companies
in forums like http://webhostingtalk.com can provide you
with pro and con views that you'll require to make the decision.
Still, most of the outsourced companies provide you with
a testing period of upto a month to test them out. You can
utilize this time period to analyze the quality of your
support company, if you are not sure about it.
The disadvantages associated with the two types of support
are provided in the chart below:
DISADVANTAGES
In-House
1) Expensive when taking into consideration the living
standards in North America and Europe
2) Headaches related to personnel management related with
maintaining an inhouse team for support
3) Remedies are to be made by you in case of any immediate
non availability of support staff due to reasons like their
resignation without prior notice, termination, expiry etc.
Outsourced
1) No direct interaction in person with the support staff.
( overcomed if efficient chat support is provided with a
contact person at the company )
2) Have to get accustomed with your support people, as
they might keep on changing according to the outsource company's
internal policies.
3) Have got to make sure of the written ( spoken too, if
required ) language proficiency of the company staff, as
English is not the mother tongue in the outsourced companies.
The language barrier could be an issue with only a few
cheap quality outsourced support companies. It would be
a good measure to talk to their representatives / contact
points over chat / telephone to get an idea of how it's
going to be overall. With the leading support companies,
the language problems should not happen, as they would have
required formal training both technically, as well as with
customer orientation. Still, it is very important from your
part to make sure of their support quality.
To summarize, it is always better to choose a good outsourced
support firm, that maintains it's promises and does not
comprise on quality, rather than yourself employing separate
staff to handle your technical support, sales / billing
and server administration. ( Unless you have got the money
to roll, and is keen on having all your employees available
in person upon your call )
The Quality Factor
Speaking of quality, what do one exactly mean by or point
to when talking about the Quality of Support ( QoS ) ? Quality
is not an accident, but the collective output of well planned
stages of service, with the very best systems to back them
up. When we refer to the complete QoS, there are a lot of
points that comes into consideration - Being knowledgeable,
Polite, Communicative, Honest, Fast, Empathetic, Competent,
Responsible and above all, overall Perfection. Let's check
out how these becomes important.
Being knowledgeable is the most important part. Always
keep in mind that our customers needs competent people at
the receiving end of their mails and calls. By being knowledgeable,
we mean that the support person should be possessing the
proper knowledge level related to the support and service
that we are offering. In this case, say, if you are a host
who offers Cpanel hosting on Red hat Enterprise Linux servers,
the technical support staff that works for you should be
having extensive knowledge in the following areas:
Linux Operating System structure
Linux commands - common and advanced
Linux Internet server implementations
Linux server security
Differences between RHEL, and other versions of RedHat
Linux, and also other distros and flavors of Linux. Proficiency
in Unix / Solaris flavors will be an added advantage.
Cpanel control panel proficiency using both fronted tools
( administrative / user control panel interfaces ) and also
the Cpanel control panel specific files in the backend of
the servers
Overall, by being knowledgeable, it means that the support
team must be well qualified and trained to handle the job
that they are doing. Choose your team of experts wisely.
Responsibility of your support team is another important
aspect. There is a lot of difference between a person who
has undergone years of dedicated computer study in school
and college doing this job, and a teenager with some computer
background doing it part-time. The support team should be
responsible in addressing various heterogeneous issues,
and should also be good with the decision making related
to the smooth functioning of the servers.
Say, one of your servers is having an issue with the apache
server software running in the server being not compatible
with PHP, as a result of a latest control panel upgrade.
Your support team must not only be able to fix the immediate
requests from customers hosted in this server, but should
also be taking the necessary steps to identify the root
cause of the issue, implement it in the server under question,
and also check the rest of the servers ( if any ) for similar
compatibility issues, and get them fixed, so that no unnecessary
botherations are avoided for both the party - the customer
and the support rep.
To sum up things, the support techs should not be just
people to see off the day to day issues of the end customer,
but they should be responsible so as to ensure that the
server is fine tuned to see off any vulnerability associated
with it, so that no issues arise from within the server
as a result of an exploitation of that.
Then comes the communication part. This is as important
as being knowledgeable. A support technician needs to address
an issue raised by you or an end customer in grammatically
correct language, and also including all the important points
related to the issue, that the customer should be made aware
of. A polite, consice and communicative reply addressing
the various aspects of a support ticket always gives the
end customer a feeling of care. A good support tech is one
who empathises the client, i.e, think by standing in the
client's shoes. When a support person can feel the client's
problems, and read in between the lines, it puts the end
client at ease, no matter what the issue is. Just take the
case of the following scenario. A customer has published
the following support ticket:
Hi,
I am not able to send mails out of my account user@foo.com.
The mails are not going out of Outlook Express, and I am
getting the following error:
Mail refused error "sorry that domain isn't in my
list of allowed rcpthosts error 553"
Please get it fixed ASAP. I am unable to contact my customers
!!!
Paul Smith
And consider the following replies, which implies the same
message, and tell me which one feels better:
Response # 1 :
This is since you are not doing POP before SMTP. Check
your incoming mails, before trying to send them using OE.
Support team
Response # 2 :
Hi Paul,
This error is caused when email client software configured
with multiple email accounts from different domains is used
to send email to an account that it has not checked for
messages first. To get over this, always make sure to check
the incoming mails using your Outlook Express, before trying
to send mails out of it. This is called POP before SMTP.
An easy remedy is to check your email from user@foo.com
before sending or set your email client to check email every
15 minutes or close and reopen your Outlook Express. It
shall work for you, and you shall be able to mail your customers
in no time.
Best Regards,
Tech name
Support team
Upon examining the above two replies, what do you feel?
No matter how frustrated the end customer who sent in the
ticket might be, response # 2 will provide him with the
"care factor" that response # 1 could not do.
In response # 2, the support tech has done the following:
Analyzed that the customer is not very techny-savvy
Understood that he is trying to send in some important
mail(s), and is frustrated with things not going working
correctly for him
Replied the customer very politely and with atmost care
keeping both the above two considerations in mind.
Support techs should always be polite to the customers.
Some of the customers may even use harsh terms while mailing
the support team, due to their frustration. A support tech
should just ignore those comments, keeping in mind the fact
that it is nothing personal and the customer is just angry
with some utility not working for him properly. There are
certain rare cases, when the support team receives really
hard-to-interact-with customers. Some people might just
do not understand what the support person is trying to say,
or not listen what he is asking the customer to do. In these
rare cases of non co operation, it is always better for
the hosting owner ( you ) to respond to the customer asking
him politely to co operate with the support team, or any
solution to his problem might get unnecessarily delayed.
The overall perfection of a support team is the right combination
of the following qualities:
1) Technical Superiority
2) Command over written and communicative skills
3) Politeness , Friendliness and Empathy
4) Responsibility
5) Endurance
The webhosts, on the other hand should also understand
that the support team is an integral part of his business,
and treat them with respect and consideration. The webhosting
owner should be a good manager here, who knows how to make
his support team work with their maximum potential for him.
At the same time, he should not pressurize them by unnecessarily
interfering in their job. Always keep them at ease, and
make them feel free to approach you with any of their requirements
/ suggestions.
Conclusion
To conclude, when you appoint the support team, to assist
with your business, make sure of the following things:
You get what you are promised of ( 24 / 7 support , and
the exact time limits required to reply to, and resolve
a problem )
Your support team co ordinates perfectly with you, and
has got a good knowledge on the plans, services, and offers
that you provide your clients with, so that they can be
serviced better, and on time.
Your support team is friendly and courteous, and is always
willing to go that 'extra step' when it comes to customer
satisfaction.
Your support team is extremely knowledgeable and should
be able to do anything that their job demands out of them.
You should be in excellent rapport with your support team,
and should let them be at ease with you; and at the same
time you should know where to draw the fine line as well.
In the webhosting business, where stiff competition awaits
you, it is always the customer evangelism ( customers preaching
the good points of your webhosting service ) that brings
in clients. There is no publicity as mouth publicity. Your
support team would be responsible for more than 80% of it.
If they are good, your business shall flourish, and if it's
the other way around, you are going to have a tough time
in the future.
So choose wisely. There is a bright future awaiting you.
Compiled by Yusuff Rejo, Team Leader, Bobcares
The author, Yusuff Rejo has been working as a Team leader
for the last 3 years at BobCares.com, a premier web hosting
support provider for various hosting companies, datacenters
and ISP's all over the world.
His main areas of interests are Personnel management, Transactional
analysis, and Web hosting articles. He spends his leisure
time enjoying Classic 60's-70's Rock, latest hollywood movies,
and playing table tennis.
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