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.
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.
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