Why you should use a forum software for your hosting company?

Well, for many advantages that it has got but only when the forum is functional and your staff pays attention to what users say in the forum.

Communicate – A forum can be very useful to make the announcements about server outages, network upgrades, planned and unplanned outages, security attacks, power outages etc. Use it to the best of your advantage and request your users to check the forums first to find out if there are known issues with network or servers they are on. This saves on a lot of support tickets.

Knowledge Base – Use the forum like a knowledge base. Make sticky posts for new users, create threads that talk about most common issues and resolutions. Analyze your previous tickets and make sticky posts about most commonly reported issues by new users. This will save a lot of time for your staff.

Grow into a Community – Users help other users. When a forum is functional, you will find that end users often help other users on technical issues. This will result in significant increase in productive hours for your staff and that time could be used in doing something else.

I see the forum as a value added service that has more advantages than the disadvantages which I am unable to think of. I recommend that your hosting company should have a forum and your staff pay close attention to it. It adds value after all!
[tags]Web Hosting, Customer Support, Forum Hosting, Internet Forum Software[/tags]

1. Always seek confirmation – Even when you are sure that the issue that was initially reported has been resolved, don’t just close the tickets. Send an update on the ticket, informing the customers that the issue seems to have resolved and ask them to close the tickets at their end. If your ticketing system doesn’t come with this feature, get one or close it after receiving a confirmation from users. Following this strategy will make your customers feel good and satisfied with your support function.

2. Don’t assume – Don’t ever assume that an issue has been resolved or does not exists. Ex: It so happened that once I was unable to open my website using different ISP connections that I was using. The problem was with BGP routers that were at the ISP that provided bandwidth to the hosting company my domain was hosted with. The customer rep simply closed the ticket because he was able to open it internally in his LAN. When you are not sure, ask the customer to explain the issue or elaborate on it. Don’t make your customers angry by assuming things by yourself.

3. Customers are not tech savvy – Ok, nice to know that you are an expert in Sun Solaris and managed hosting solutions. But your customer is not! Have patience while handling tickets of customers who know only a thing or two about managing her/his website. Help them help themselves, don’t get angry if they can not understand basics. If they were to be technically strong, why would they need you?

Always remember, before you close support tickets, get a confirmation from your customer on resolution. By the way, do you follow Voice of Customer model to get feedback from your customer about your customer support?
[tags]Customer Support, Web Hosting Business[/tags]

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.

Please post your feedback and suggestions in the comments section below.

1. Your tickets are not looked into for more than 2-3 days. An isolated incident like that is ok but if that’s the average time taken to respond to your tickets, watch out.
2. Every time you call the customer support, a voice mail greets you.
3. Your hosting company’s network or server is often down and the host does not provide you with an explanation about the frequent downtime.
4. You are billed for something you don’t use and hosting company’s billing department doesn’t respond to your emails. But, is there a billing department?
5. The technical staff looking into your ticket doesn’t have a clue about what the underlying problem could be and gives you some weird explanation. (example – your emails are not coming through and they tell you that entire Internet is down )

Now that you know what to watch out, use it to your best advantage.

• Hosting business is not for everyone.
• It is not as easy as people think it to be.
• It is not an overnight-get-rich business.
• It’s a niche market and you will have to compete with several other companies.
• Offering cheap web hosting plans will not bring in lot of customers.
• Advertising on search engines will surely bring in visitors but not customers always.
• Over 40,000 companies worldwide are engaged in web hosting services. Where will you stand?

Do you think you can manage the hosting business?

Most of us are quite optimistic about ideas that we have and it is really good to be confident about what we want to do. It is only time which will prove if your idea was worth what you thought it to be. This section will help you familiarize yourself with some of the most commonly asked questions in the hosting industry. We are sure you must have already given some thought to the points mentioned below but for those who are yet to know the inside-out of this business, it might really help.

What does a customer expect from a webhosting company?

Most of the customers expect their hosting provider’s resources to be always available and also when they need support. This would mean that you as a hosting company is directly responsible for providing 24x7x365 support to your customers. If your clients are local (same city, state), they might even want to call you when they need your help. You may not have enough support personnel from the day one, which means you should expect yourself to be able answer their queries and in timely fashion too!

Are you financially strong enough to start a hosting company?

Starting a hosting business requires significant amount of investment. Money is required before you start the business to register your company, website and recruiting technically qualified staff, marketing staff, for brand building and getting a sales department in place. The amount of money required may differ if you want to get into the market offering all hosting packages that are most commonly offered in the industry or you may want to focus on specific offerings only. Software license are not cheap and if you are not technical, letting a service provide manage your servers might prove to be very costly to you in the early days of your business. If you plan to hire dedicated customer support personnel to support end users, then you may want to think about number of months that you will have pay them till you become profitable.

Do you have the latest technology?

End users always want to have the latest of innovations in their hands. This might require your dedicated time and efforts to lean and upgrade your technology at offering. There are so many patches that are released by various vendors and you will need to install to keep your servers and other softwares always upto date. For example, you are the owner of a hosting company which is specialized in reseller hosting solutions and you offer hosting on Linux platform only. Consider a security leak in one of the applications that you have installed in the server for which the application vendor releases a patch. If you are not aware of this security leak, it might pose a serious threat to your business. Staying current is a must!

How will you support your customers?

We would be happy to open a web based trouble ticket and receive a prompt reply with resolution. This may not be the case with every customer. Some would want to talk to a person to ensure that they have escalated the problem to a person and is being resolved. These type of customers would want to ensure that their problems are being addressed and someone is working on their critical issues. For not so critical issues, customers may find it more convenient to open a ticket in the web based ticketing system.

Yes, we agree, those were not all the factors but, as we told you, were the most common factors that will affect your business in both short and long term. If you run your own hosting company and needs suggestions, please feel free to contact us and we will help you do better in the business.

Customer support is a critical part of any hosting company and it’s a direct point of contact with your end customers. At any point of time if you want to know how well is your customer support department performing, you might look at the number of tickets opened during a certain duration, the average response time, mean time between creation and closure of the ticket. This alone will give you a big picture about the performance of your support function. But you still don’t know how well are they performing in terms of customer satisfaction. Would you know, out of 100 tickets that gets closed every day, how many were closed with complete resolution and if your customers were really delighted? Do you?

» How do I know if my customers are happy and measure the success of my customer support?

Happy customers can make a lot of difference to your business, not only they can bring in many more potential customers by referring to your service and products but stay with you for much longer than you can imagine. What else would you want?

VoC stands for Voice of Customer. It’s a true measurement of the success of your customer support and goes beyond just plain numbers of measurement. VoC can actually tell you if your customers are really happy or not. Depending on how you build your VoC system, you can improve your customer support and take it to the next level.

» How to build a VoC system?

It’s much simpler than you think. All you have to do is provide a way for your customers to raise their voice to let you know if they are satisfied with your support. How to do this? – One example would be sending an email to your customers as soon as their tickets are close, with a questionnaire that they can fill and provide you with a feedback. If your customers talk to you over phone, you can still send them a VoC form with questionnaire via email, post it or ask them about their experience with customer support while they are still on the phone. But you must then be recording those calls and listen to them to be able to determine their satisfaction level. And if you have outsourced your customer support, what other way can you think of to really know how well are your customers satisfied?

Since the focus of this blog is on hosting industry, let me give you some related sample question that you can put up on your form and have your customers select the satisfaction level when they receive the email with the link to your VoC form.

» Did the technical support agent understood your problem and offered a correct solution? (Rate 1-5)
» Was your ticket attended in a timely manner and resolution offered as per your expectations? (Rate 1-5)
» Did the customer support rep speak to you in a polite and professional manner? (Rate 1-5)
» Was your problem escalated to the 2nd level support in a timely manner? (Rate 1-5)
» Please rate your overall satisfaction with the customer support. (Rate 1-5)

Those were just some sample questions and you can change them or add more questions based on your requirement. But once you start receiving the feedback from your customers, immediately act upon them. If your customers do not see an impact of their feedback, they will not provide you with any further feedback and your VoC system will be of no use. Change your business model such that your business is feedback driven that your customers will truly appreciate.

If you need any help with building a VoC system for your business, please feel free to contact me.