PlexiHosting
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If you are thinking about outsourcing your support, even to just one person helping you part time during the off hours, you should consider a well-planned "test" of their stated skills.
This can happen many ways. Some prefer to start with a formal Q&A interview, typical of any industry, to get a good feel for the applicant and to verify and flesh out any information from their resume/application. This is a very good start. However, I wouldn't normally hire someone after just this level of interviewing.
The technical expertise and customer service/interpersonal skills of your technical support personnel should definitely be scrutinized. Remember to keep the scrutinizing methods and criteria realistic, based upon the level of support you'd like to hire the person for. Many believe that this can only be done by seeing what the potential hire will do "in action". I recommend setting up a trial period where the applicant can take tickets/chats/whatever and really show their stuff.
You may want to set up a test environment for the applicants, so they do not interact with real customers, if you don't have that level of comfort with them yet. Your customers are your greatest asset so remember to tread lightly with them so as not to shatter that fragile and important relationship. You do not have to tell the applicant that you have set up a testing environment without real customers. You can create all of the issues yourself and submit tickets, etc, and get a feel for how they interact with people and how they solve problems.
Another way to do this is to simply ask them how they would solve certain issues when asked. Feel free to submit some of your favorite questions to this thread if you have them - I love to see what people ask potential support personnel! I usually ask a few straightforward newbie questions about the control panel(s), e-mail and FTP, a couple simple questions that are a little be outside the range of their skillset or outside of the scope of what they are supposed to support to see if they will still at least put an effort into point the customer in the right direction (or escalate as necessary), and a trick question or two (SSL install on an account that they would know has a shared IP, typical exploits of mod_usedir and such that might be "red flags", etc).
Feel free to get a little rude or pushy (within reason). Some customers will do this, it is a reality that we face every day. See how they react to different types of rude customers - do they know that a customer may just feel pressure because their site is down (or think it is) and calm them down effectively while resolving the issue? Will they cut off contact as appropriate after an extremely rude customer goes over the line, and simply escalate to the appropriate person?
All in all, if you are going to have anybody else interacting with your most valuable asset, you had better be sure that they are representing you not only technically but are providing top-notch customer service in a friendly fashion.
Please please please elaborate on this and let us all know your process, questions, stories, etc.
This can happen many ways. Some prefer to start with a formal Q&A interview, typical of any industry, to get a good feel for the applicant and to verify and flesh out any information from their resume/application. This is a very good start. However, I wouldn't normally hire someone after just this level of interviewing.
The technical expertise and customer service/interpersonal skills of your technical support personnel should definitely be scrutinized. Remember to keep the scrutinizing methods and criteria realistic, based upon the level of support you'd like to hire the person for. Many believe that this can only be done by seeing what the potential hire will do "in action". I recommend setting up a trial period where the applicant can take tickets/chats/whatever and really show their stuff.
You may want to set up a test environment for the applicants, so they do not interact with real customers, if you don't have that level of comfort with them yet. Your customers are your greatest asset so remember to tread lightly with them so as not to shatter that fragile and important relationship. You do not have to tell the applicant that you have set up a testing environment without real customers. You can create all of the issues yourself and submit tickets, etc, and get a feel for how they interact with people and how they solve problems.
Another way to do this is to simply ask them how they would solve certain issues when asked. Feel free to submit some of your favorite questions to this thread if you have them - I love to see what people ask potential support personnel! I usually ask a few straightforward newbie questions about the control panel(s), e-mail and FTP, a couple simple questions that are a little be outside the range of their skillset or outside of the scope of what they are supposed to support to see if they will still at least put an effort into point the customer in the right direction (or escalate as necessary), and a trick question or two (SSL install on an account that they would know has a shared IP, typical exploits of mod_usedir and such that might be "red flags", etc).
Feel free to get a little rude or pushy (within reason). Some customers will do this, it is a reality that we face every day. See how they react to different types of rude customers - do they know that a customer may just feel pressure because their site is down (or think it is) and calm them down effectively while resolving the issue? Will they cut off contact as appropriate after an extremely rude customer goes over the line, and simply escalate to the appropriate person?
All in all, if you are going to have anybody else interacting with your most valuable asset, you had better be sure that they are representing you not only technically but are providing top-notch customer service in a friendly fashion.
Please please please elaborate on this and let us all know your process, questions, stories, etc.
Sounds like you are getting all your ducks in a row before running out of the gate, too.
