Do you outsource support?

H

Hosting42

New member
Hello,

As a small-business and a Hosting Company we have found it hard to survive in the Web Hosting industry. In order for us to compete with leading brands. We felt it was necessary to step up our game and offer 24x7x365 Support. Although as a small business this can be a high overhead and unrealistic.

We were just curious to if you outsource your support to keep overhead affordable or how do you respond to this issue of supporting clients?

Thank you.
 
Personally we use home-grown support, in all my experience I have found this to be the right path to success. The benefits for that are countless. You are involved in all phases of training and you shape your employees to embrace the values of your business. Moreover you can build company loyalty much easier and that is what you need in the long-term so it can reflect to the service you provide to your customers. You also have much more control on their everyday tasks and with the proper monitoring you can straighten up any procedural issues.

On the other hand, outsourced support, while sometimes cheaper and with less effort, has somewhat of a bad name in hosting for a reason. Mainly its risky! If you dont have a sure outsourcing provider with tested services and staff, there is a high chance you will find some people with little to no knowledge of the business. They would be able to train and be on the frontline, helping some customers, but in the long run such service deteriorates and leaves clients with a bad taste. Nowadays brand matters more and more and this is why you want your brand to reflect your perfect visions for it.

With that said, again, nothing against outsourced support, just some points to consider :rolleyes2
 
It sounds like you have a small number of clients and In that case out osurcing might not cut it for you. It will be expensive. In house might be better for you at the momment but my concern is If you have just a handful of clients, why would you fail to provide them the support without extra hands? Why is the volume of support requests, seemingly high yet the clients seem few?
 
if you outsource your support, your clients will be able to tell. you get what you pay for. especially if it has to do with interacting with clients. now, if you want them to do technical stuff or write scripts for you, no issues there.
 
ChromeHost-Sid said:
if you outsource your support, your clients will be able to tell.
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Holding other factors constant, the clients may not know BUT Unless its really called for a firm thats seemingly that small like he described shouldnt be outsourcing support. Hire someone if you cant offer the support with the staff you have.
 
if the support is answering tickets, you can usually tell from the grammar and english. We do not choose to use outsourced support for our company although it will be considerably cheaper. I know many big webhosting companies outsource and there is nothing wrong with that.
 
It is good that you are being honest. A lot of smaller hosting providers claim to offer 24/7 support but in reality it is just a one man show - clients have to basically wait for the owner to wake up and finish his breakfast before they can get a response.

Outsourcing support is expensive especially if you are a smaller business and the outsourced support will definitely lack in quality compared to if you were handling it yourself.

I believe as a smaller setup, it will be much better to compete based on your dedication to client support. Even if you responded a few hours slower, as long as the client can tell you are concerned about their query, they would still remain happy.
 
HostWithLove said:
It is good that you are being honest. A lot of smaller hosting providers claim to offer 24/7 support but in reality it is just a one man show - clients have to basically wait for the owner to wake up and finish his breakfast before they can get a response.

Outsourcing support is expensive especially if you are a smaller business and the outsourced support will definitely lack in quality compared to if you were handling it yourself.

I believe as a smaller setup, it will be much better to compete based on your dedication to client support. Even if you responded a few hours slower, as long as the client can tell you are concerned about their query, they would still remain happy.
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I disagree with you.

Outsource is not expensive for small companies. The way my company started was per ticket/ per chat through outsource support. It was not that costy and made our support bullet proof.
 
I believe that you will have more benefits that constraints with home-grown support. And i really believe that the major benefit is that you can give your own train and transmit your thoughts and 'love' that you feel for your company. That's a step forward to create a team that can transmit that 'love' and customer care to the customers when giving support to them.

You can, in long term, outsource some of your support. But this 'outsource team' must have someone in site of your 'local' team' to control and monitorize.
 
If you choose to outsource the support you should probably do 50/50. Figure out how many hours you can reasonably provide support every day. Then outsource the rest. Follow up on every outsourced ticket personally to see if they are happy with the resolution process. You would want to handle the support either during the time-frame that you see the most tickets or during the time-frame that your primary customer base is likely to be awake.
 
Probably using a chat system like Livezilla can help you, as it starts a chat when support is available and creates a ticket when support is offline. Therefore, you will not miss a single customer request.

If your small hosting company has more than 3 customer support employees, you can already provide 24/7 support. Having 4 employees means possibility of day offs, having 5 means ability to have sick leaves and vacations. If you have 5+ - you are no longer small.

Outsourcing support can decimate your income, because clients do not come every hour, but you should pay for every hour outsourced employee spent providing support. Helix247 also gave great pieces of advise here.
 
HostedInside said:
I disagree with you.

Outsource is not expensive for small companies. The way my company started was per ticket/ per chat through outsource support. It was not that costy and made our support bullet proof.
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I have yet to see an outsourced company that was more than a glorified script reader/snooze button.

"We've escalated this to our support department". Great...
 
Always suggest in-house team it will help you in lot of things, and maintain the respond time like 30 min if you go with outsourced company they just try to make ticket like "Answered" without know real problem
 
We don't need outsource support since we are able to manage everything ourselves and we don't receive too many tickets because everything is functioning fine and working every day.
 
bad experince with outsourcing

Hi,
when you out outsourcing your support, It means that your comapny has grown.

we tried it once when we grow but it was horrible beacuse the support of the outsource was with a very poor knowledge and the customers and the care of their problems where not successful.
 
yoni said:
Hi,
when you out outsourcing your support, It means that your comapny has grown.

we tried it once when we grow but it was horrible beacuse the support of the outsource was with a very poor knowledge and the customers and the care of their problems where not successful.
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Which means you simply chose the wrong outsource team. We use out own support, as out techs are a team of CISCO-certified professionals, yet many our clients use Ukrainian support teams.

They have good English, good communication skills, are very techy and learn fast. They do cost about 3 times more as compared to Indian support, yet they work 10 times as efficient, so it is money well spent.
 
Absolutely no outsourcing for any sales, engineering or support here at Steadfast. It may be okay for some small hosting companies, but we find that our customers value the ability to talk to a qualified sys-admin or engineer who is actually on site 24/7/365.
 
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