Reducing Customer Support Costs

Technical support is an integral component of any Web hosting operation. Support can be described as the personal assistance resellers or a Web hosting vendor provides to end- users concerning their hosting service. The term is frequently associated with the telephone help lines provided by most vendors. In this sense, the quality of support can be graded in degrees, ranging from atrocious to outstanding.

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The best customer or technical support consists of real-time conversations between end-users and knowledgeable representatives for the reseller or vendor, and the availability of such representatives without long waits. Your customers will require technical support in order to learn how to utilize the functionality of the hosting services that you resell. This fact will be especially true of small to mid-sized businesses that wish to take full advantage of their Web hosting service.

Further, those who are not experts with computers and the Internet will require detailed instructions on how your Web hosting service works and how it can be beneficial to their business.

It is the job of the competent hosting reseller to provide a sufficient level of technical support to satisfy the needs of their clients. Competent technical support is in-depth and responsive. It should be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to compete with other hosting providers and resellers. Technical support should be available via telephone and e-mail. Many resellers ensure that their telephone lines are toll-free, so that the customer does not pay the telephone charge for support.

Because technical support is so labor and capital intensive, is tremendously expensive to provide to clientele. It however is such an integral component of service provision that it must always be provided. For this reason, most resellers encourage technical support through the more inexpensive channels of e-mail and instant messaging technologies.

Technical support offered by e-mail is usually provided as a 24-hour service. Instant messaging is usually offered as a "business hours" service since IM clients must be staffed to take inquiries.

Technical support creates customer satisfaction, so it is a necessity that your technical support responses are reliable and professional. It is also important that your technical support is timely.

Most Web hosting customers will expect action on a technical support request within a 24-hour period. In order to satisfy your customer, you will need to ensure that you respond within that time window.

Because of the human and technical resources that are required, providing technical support can be expensive undertaking. It is therefore the focus of most Web host resellers to constrain technical support costs. Many resellers attempt to do this by creating detailed technical support resources that users can refer to online.

Many resellers offer a "frequently asked questions" section and a "knowledge base" of frequently asked technical support inquiries online. These resources usually address the basics of Web hosting, including how your service works and how utilize its functionality (control panels, accessing FTP to upload files, utilizing databases or ColdFusion).

More and more resellers are also taking advantage of more in-depth resources that they can offer to their customers. Web hosting vendors that specialize in offering products and services specifically to resellers have begun to offer user manuals to their clientele. Resellers can, in turn, private label these manuals and offer them to their clientele via the Web.

By providing an online manual that examines and explains your service offerings and their functionality in-depth, reseller operations such as your own will be able to decrease operating costs that are dedicated to support, thereby lower expenses while still providing a mission-critical service feature.