Top 5 risks involved with outsourcing your hosting business
Tags: Customer Support, Hosting, Outsource, Technical Support
Many hosting businesses outsource some or most of their hosting activities to a third party company to save money. Customer support is the most outsourced component of a hosting business, now a days. Like any other business outsourcing, there are many levels of risks associated with outsourcing a hosting business or some of its activities to a third party company. In this post we will cover some of them.
1. Technically Incompetent Company - The company that will manage your hosting business, on your behalf, must be technically qualified to effectively manage your hosting support. If they are not, you run the risk of losing your valuable customers and brand image in the market. Make sure that you look at profiles of individuals who will support your hosting company and ensure that they are capable of handling your technical support issues.
2. Language Barrier - If you choose to outsource your hosting support to other countries, then be aware that English is not the primary language in many countries, therefore your customers may find it very difficult to interact with customer support guys and have their issues resolved. Speak to some of the tech/sales staff before you decide on a company.
3. Lack of Quality Control - Third party companies may tend to manage their day-to-day operations in their own way. If they do it well, you have the advantage, if they don’t, it will directly impact your business. People in outsourced company may not understand the importance of your business and you may not be able to intervene in their management activities to iron out management issues. You should talk to them in advance about this side of outsourcing.
4. Control of Your Servers - You end up giving complete control of your servers to a third party company. If you are not technically savvy, you may never know what is happening with your servers and what kind of managed hosting support activities such as patching, upgrades etc, is being done on your servers.
5. It Takes Time - It takes lot of time for the external company to understand what you want and align their operations with your business goals. They look at your business from only the support point of view, and nothing more. The onus is on you to clearly tell the outsourced company what your expectations are and if not told in advance, will result in unpleasant experience. Before you get in an agreement with the company, discuss about your SLAs and quality of support that is desired. It will save you from unnecessary hassles in long run.
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[tags]Customer Support, Hosting, Outsource, Technical Support[/tags]
