Do you outsource support?

Outsourcing support is not always the best choice. If you are not able to manage the support and your budget isn't all that great to hire an in-house support tech then outsourcing becomes quite a reasonable deal to work with.
 
serverbundle said:
Outsourcing support is not always the best choice. If you are not able to manage the support and your budget isn't all that great to hire an in-house support tech then outsourcing becomes quite a reasonable deal to work with.
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Second to this. Our support is in-house. It's not that we don't think outsourcing isn't a good idea it's more the fact that our customers feel more looked after by in house support. Another reason is for the accreditations we are applying for which requires servers and support etc to be in the UK.
 
Now days 50-70 % hosting is outsourced and it is better to manage outsourced support instead of in house.

I am working for 10 years and sourced 4 -5 Big reputed hosting companies.
 
I actually like the idea of haveing humains available at night who could wake us up if a customer has a very serious issue. Any support ticket not set as urgent should not go to outsourced support and they should just be able to decide if it is worth waking us up or not or only answer questions when they are sure.

I've seen that there are some outsourcing companies that speak French but haven't actually gone into it yet as our customers are very understanding about not getting support at night (probably because the large French hosting companies often take 24 hours to respond or have support that can't answer any technical questions.
 
My one issue with outsourcing is quality control.

In our situation, we have other business lines other than our main web hosting brand that require supporting. So we've been able to pool resources over multiple business channels and projects. We also divide it across people located in Canada and Bangladesh. But the staff in Bangladesh are direct employees.

I always find that an actual employee cares more for your business and they can build relationships with your clients.

For small businesses or start-up's, I think it can make real sense to outsource initially. But most people can tell when they're dealing with an outsourced member of staff these days and it doesn't always leave a positive taste.
 
We don't do outsourcing support. Level 1 & 2 issues via live chat and help desk can easily manageable, but up to Level 3 It requires more time to investigate the issues. If you don't have the technical folks in a team, you should hire the outsourcing guys. They can work according to your requires and I am not against to hire outsource technicians.

Here is the great article of Inc Magazine "How Remote Teams Are Becoming the Future of Work".
 
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I too started at the end of the 90's, actually 1998 to be exact. I have had 3 hosting companies, my 3rd one being now. The 1st company, I closed as neither my business partner nor me had time to run it, and he basically was using funds from the account without letting me know and I didn't know that he did that and overdrafted the account by $100, and caused financial issues and then he took off, leaving me to deal with it. Needless to say, I had to pay it out of my own pocket to make good with the bank and I fired him and closed the company.

Then the 2nd company, I had for over 15 years and then hired my brother-in-law to do work for me and he was working for me for a year and then he started doing things, not treating customer's right, doing shotty work and got us bad review after bad review and I would spend 10-12 hours a day, just doing damage control and it got to be overwhelming, but the time I resolved 1 issue, I had 3 more coming at me. It was a really, really bad experience and I resent him for it, and because he ran my 15 year old company into the ground and has us into the negatives and bad and worse column, there was no coming back, it was just happening too fast, so I had no other choice but to close the doors for that company and dissolve it.

Now.. I have learned my lesson, I'm going to continue like it was in the old days... and I'm going to be a 1 man show with my wife backing me and helping with billing, customer service, L1 support, etc.

With the 2 of us, we will do just fine.

My phone lines are open 24/7 and I try to stay in chat as much as humanly possible, even when I'm mobile, I have chat open on my phone and can respond to live chats there too.

I'm offering 24/7/365 support to my customers. My response time is usually minutes to 1-2 hours on average, depends on how busy I am and how many people I'm working with.

Furthermore, being the CEO of my company, I can do what I want, when I want and set my own pricing and make special deals as I seem fit.

If I ever, and I mean ever, outsource my support, I would first try to hire remote techs (that work directly for me first). If that didn't work, I would thoroughly check out the outsourcing company and would ask for atleast 5 references of their clients for me to contact to get their experience about the company. Then I would like to have a 30 day trial to ensure that we are a good fit together. I don't want to waste my money and time with a company that can't meet my needs.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions about anything I mentioned here or need me to clarify anything.

Good luck with your support offerings!
 
If you are going to oursource support , give a try with timedoctor.com. Its good application to monitor staff who is working remotely . Not a single thing they can hide :)

If you have development team you can build too like this. just to save amount for each user.
 
much depends on how many tickets received per day, if you can handle something, do not think you need the support of external support
 
We do not outsource, we have our in house technicians, sometimes you will realize outsource hard to control and make things perfect.
 
Hosting42 said:
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.
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Outsources 24x7 support is not a good choice for startup web hosting company because as a startup company, you should provide quality support to clients because initially client satisfaction matters.
 
i am a 1 man band and have been since i started in 1999 and never needed to outsource.
I offer 24/7 support, which can be achieved through a good Knowledgebase, tutorials, ticket system.

as all 24/7 support mean is that you have some sort of support available 24/7. a KB and tutorials are forms of self help support.

you then have 24/7 Live support which means you have a person available 24/7, which is impossible for a 1 man band.

I am available live from 9am til midnight 7 days a week, although that does not mean if a client contacts me at 11.58PM i will leave them at 12 midnight, i will stay until they are happy. I have seen me working with a client until 3 am. In my early days the longest i worked straight through was approx. 74 hrs.
 
A quick and simple answer to the OP's question - no, we don't outsource support, but that doesn't mean that all outsourced support is bad, and I take offense that some here disparage entire countries.
 
Yes! We outsource most of our support to a company who specialises in outsourced support for web hosting services.

As long as you choose a reputable company there's nothing wrong with it.
 
We do not outsource support, but we would if the workload became unbearable. The key is to make sure they know what they are doing, and open a few fake support tickets yourself.
 
Outsourcing sounds like a great idea until you hear the prices. A dedicated team from a company in the US offers support on a 24/7 basis (with a team of 6 people in 4 hour shifts) at around 15.000 USD per month. Now, being just one person per shift, how many tasks can he do simultaneously? And this is just tier 2 support, the most complicated stuff must be done in-house.

So no for outsourcing. Even for big companies, I believe that unless you sell a very expensive product, it is more cheap to grow your own department of support.
 
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