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What is acceptable support in 2022? #Frustrated
I am currently building out buyservers.com, I have been trying to launch this for 6 months. I am setting my support standards the same as the web hosting companies I have worked for in the past. Here is how I plan to provide support:
- Ticket is received
- Within 15 minutes, a response is submitted to the customer. Response can be a simple "I received the ticket and I am working on it"
- Every 15 minutes to half hour ( depending on workload ) the customer receives an update on the progress of their request.
- Obviously free migration tickets, billing, DMCA etc will not receive this type of attention.
I ask this because of the support I have received. Examples:
- I am on a ticket with Virtualizor/Softaculous for a proxmox question about LVM. The way I usually use LVMs in Proxmox is causing issues with Virtualizor. I asked a simple question about lvm partitions. It has been 3 days and the only response I have received is " what is your license number" which I provided yesterday and still have no response.
- Another company I worked with, made a script and the script had a rm -rf /var in it. Let's just say those servers got new operating systems.
It seems like this is happening more and more. If a company's support can not resolve my problem in 24 hours, I do not want to do business with them anymore. You are talking about billing software, customers etc being down for days. Basically my customers would be waiting days for their problems to be resolved when this happens. I only have a handful of customers but this is unacceptable.
I am the type of person who hates submitting tickets. Believe me, when I submit a ticket, I have exhausted your knowledge base, tutorials, youtube etc. I have also worked for web hosting companies for over 25 years, so when I say it is your code, it is your code, I even supply logs.
Comments
If there was no progress, this would make the situation worse for the customer.
I also wanted to post some companies that have given me great support during this company build out I am doing. Here they are>> Enhance Control Panel, Rctheme ( highly recommend for WHMCS themes) , WHMCS and cPanel.
That is why I say "the customer receives an update on the progress of their request". I figure if I am working on something for 15-30 minutes, there should be some sort of progress? Even if progress is identifying the problem. Just a simple "I am finishing up with a customer and will start working on your ticket" is progress in my opinion.
Support, price, and scale all go together. At a small scale you can provide amazing support and low prices, but as you scale out you can provide one or the other. It's basic math, the overhead costs what it costs and employees cost what they cost. If the revenue doesn't provide enough to do both, you have to pick one. There's room in the market for companies that choose either, because some people will always value price over support.
If you found a company that does neither good pricing or support, well that's a good way to take them off of your list.
Exactly. One of the first companies I worked for did that. When everyone sold $2 hosting, they sold $49 hosting. It was support that set them apart from the rest.
Well, virtualizor with promox ain't going to be a good experience at all. Trust me it is going to give you a bunch of headaches. Virtualizor by itself managing KVM works decently. Sorry for being off topic.
well we'll see about your support standards again once the MJJs buy in
No, don't do this.
You'll get problems that vary in time required. You may not want to bottleneck everyone easy to finish the hard one.
You'll also get criticism like, "it took you X long to figure that out?" Because they'll know exactly how long you spent on it. That's only valuable when getting paid for support by the hour.
I think his price already excluded those users.
Whilst your intentions may be admirable, these are not practicable or desirable in the real-world for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been touched on in subsequent responses.
By the way, you need to figure how to get support from certain providers, eg. on OVH if you need instant support, go for PHONE call. Similarly, the vzr guys (virtualizor) they are very good if you ask them on live support. They will even log into your machine and fix it for you.
This is a good answer and I'd like to add a different insight:
We did that at a different hosting company I worked at, this doesn't scale good either. Imagine you have 5-25 on-going tickets (server crashed, ddos, etc). Every 15-30 minutes you spend 5-8 minutes just to hold hands with a customer and tell them everything is going to be ok, instead of actually working on the issue.
The best thing that works with me, both as a customer and as a provider:
Especially what I thought. "You ticket has still not been processed/advanced" type of mail would just end up becoming spam.
This. When I was offering managed hosting, my first choice back then was, among other reasons, All-Inkl. Simply, because they had competent support and a 24/7 phone line where, if you called, your problem actually got solved. If you answer to a client after x minutes helps nothing if the problem is out of your control and host xy decides to reply after 2 days.
Regarding @Lex said: I agree. Nothing is worse than a provider that prides themselves in 1min replies or 24/7 live chat that, however is highly inefficient.
I've had 24/7 live chat where the first 20 minutes of our conversation were like:
Thanks for contacting us. I will be with you in a moment
No worries, let me have a look at your issue
Have you checked our KB?
I will need to forward this issue (new agent joins chat, doesn't readup on issue, proceeds asking you everything again..)
After 30 minutes: the current team is not available, but will create a ticket for this; or: typing symbol keeps showing but nothing happens. Agent leaves the chat.
Honestly, out of the hosts I've tried out, I think @ShockHosting has some of the best/fastest support I've seen in the industry. If I recall correctly, all of their support is in house, and they have a support member that covers certain hours of the day in order to ensure that the technical support is 24/7.
When a support member is assigned to the case or views a ticket, I believe they change the status to "In Progress" in order to ensure the client knows that their issue is actively being worked on, and then they work on resolving the issue.
Their support representatives are very knowledgeable, and don't give responses that stall you. No matter the time of day, they usually give full responses within 10-15 minutes, and I've never had a technical issue cross the 20-30 minute mark.
They only provide fast technical support though, sales, DMCA, and billing isn't as fast and can take a few days.
Good intentions of providing top-notch support can quickly turn sour when you're dealing with a high volume of tickets and frustrating customers. You eventually get burnt out from all the 3€ a month guys asking hand holding and breaking their stuff and expecting us to fix it for them, while seedboxes are super expensive to produce so your annual profit is like cup of coffee.
There's like no way to win in this business when it comes to support, single bad ticket and entitled MJJ can tarnish your reputation badly, then people believe that expect that and acts like it's absolute truth and comes looking out to get that response and abusing the support.
Just had to deal with clown which told we are fraud etc. cancelled services and tried to abuse support immediately going for the fraud option. As a person handling support you want to just show them the middle finger, but you cannot because that's exactly the type of person who will go complain on forums claiming being defrauded, he actually probably did that BEFORE sending in the ticket.
Vicious cycle.
Oh the issue? Bug on WHMCS not giving second month 80% discount. How did we solve it? Gave everyone on those a free month, some even got 2 months 80% discount PLUS a free month. This just was not made on day 1 when new invoices generated (14 days before due date). We did this on day 3 when it became clear it affected 100% of those raffle 80% discounts.
Yea we are total asshat fraudsters clearly
Think about it, Telcos are universally hated. Everyone hates some telco or another, or all of them. Yet who do you turn to when you need stuff they provide? Back to them.
I bet 9/10 cases is where entitled people have expected the telco to configure their tellies or tivos for them or something stupid like that.
Yea, the telcos do stupid shit at times too, and they are frigid AF sometimes ... But consider their size and how they have to deal with the whole range of types of people.
Getting good support is a skill too. Good starting point is just asking nicely and having some patience, explaining the issue, being polite. A lot of people don't even bother being polite or asking nicely. A huge fraction of people don't even bother to tell what the issue is, you just got to guess from message reading "no work", uhm thanks, i'll spend the next hour trying to guess what does not work? NOPE, not wasting my time, just replying asking for information. or with worst offenders, it's not even worth the effort to ask because you know they will outright refuse to tell what the issue is.
So, getting good customer service is a skill as well.
Tbh, we do ask customers to choose another provider occasionally when they clearly either lacks that skillset, or they clearly have other motives. When it is clear we cannot give them the type of customer care they want are looking for. Some people are just looking for doormats they can verbally abuse too.
Now start your week by dealing with say 5 of that type, guess what kind of service the nicer guys are going to have? .... exactly! Another vicious cycle.
It's called Helldesk for a reason, and why people think it's absolutely soul crushing sucking and mentally destructive job.
Further, as a business owner you are probably the worst possible person for the job; You will get offended much easier than someone who doesn't have skin in the game. Managing your mental frame becomes hard work at that point.
Absolutely agree. And the type of questions OP has asked goes for premium support, not regular support. Way beyond the scope by the sounds of it.
We'd expect to be paid for that, and at that point he could get that level of communication. Even then expecting to start work within 15minutes? We would quadruple our rate for that level of responsiveness ... maybe even more. Infact most likely double the hourly rate PLUS few thousand € monthly fee to have someone standing by constantly waiting if this type of customer happens to need support. Can't ask anyone to be 24/7/365 on duty without extra pay.
And we already charge 165€ per hour for that type of work which goes well beyond the boundary of supplying the service and into the territory of managing the service for the customer as well.
This is why we track resolution time, not reply time
Tho resolution time is a bit harder to track as there is often thank you messages etc. but since it's always ~same, it helps tracking in performance over time.
Providing excellent customer care is hard, providing it in less than 1hour never mind within minutes, is near impossible. There is a reason why big boys ask big bucks for anything below 12-24hrs depending on the business and they outright tell you not to expect reply within hours typically.
The shorter the timeframe is the harder it becomes because highly skilled people who are also good at customer communication AND highly motivated are very very rare, and valuable. Their skills are better spent elsewhere for most of the time, or at the very least try to book their schedule full instead of handling every even the most menial task.
One of our competitors boasted about fast response times, they are slightly larger, but not that much larger. They have 18 full time people on support all over the world, that was like 60% of their costs. They wanted to either acquire us OR that we acquire them. No wonder they have to charge double, triple, quadruple for their services.
No idea if their live chat was actually any good, but rest of their support metrics were just as bonkers as well. I think they still did not manage faster than something like 15minutes response, and they were following imho all the wrong metrics and their support calls were absolutely through the roof, by orders of magnitude more requests per user than we do.
So, as i see it and in my opinion, their customers were actually paying to have chat buddy, not for the service itself.
internal screaming
Here are some stories from the other side of the chat:
I recall 3 customers in particular from the past year, frustrating and hilarious at the same time:
customer 1: came to chat to report an issue, gave absolutely no identification details (domain, service, invoice id, support pin, hell even his name would've helped), absolutely ignored any requests to identify himself and his services, only kept ranting about how shite we were, then promptly left the chat. Same customer returned 2-3 days later, to again let us know how shite we are cause we didn't fix his issue (of an unidentified service). Tried a different approach, asked for a screenshot. Nope, he don't have time for this, left the chat again.
Returned (again, ofc) 4 something days later, finally agreed to actually give us a PIN and details about the service and himself. The issue? The fucking idiot had a typo in the service domain. (bought domain google.com, hosting for gogle.com). This was visible to him too, if he would have taken 0.1 minutes to check his client area, or fucking welcome email.
All that abuse to our staff for several days and interactions (and I suspect a negative review as well) cause he was a stubborn little stupid bitch.
customer 2 : started like 11 chat sessions in 3 days to let us know his website is down, every time he would close the chat before we even had the chance to reply past the first Hello. In the last chat session he had more patience, provided the domain name (which loaded for me) and I asked him for a screenshot. He sent one dated from several days back (date was visible in the windows taskbar) and I told him to try again now. Closed the chat after and never returned again (to my knowledge).
customer 3 : combo of the above, insisted he doesn't have time to waste with our shite services and support, that he's always on the road and can't provide us any details, even sent us a selfie of him driving (you can't make this up...) and said that some of us have to work, not sit in front of the computer and type messages (LOL)
I honestly don't hate people that genuinely have issues or lack the technical knowledge, I try my best to help, guide and teach them. I'm a lazy perfectionist at core, work smart not hard type of guy, plus I'm actually a customer of the same services so I 100% understand the support related frustrations. I try my best to solve everything as fast and as best as possible so I never have to deal with that ever again.
But most of them are entitled @#$^% that never have time to even read our replies, or emails for that matter.
Oh yeah, there was one incident where I asked for a screenshot of the issue and he replied with "can you do that for me?". AAAGH
My colo facility offers no support.
If you open a ticket, I send you a key for the data center, and you can come in and fix the problem yourself.
This is how I keep costs down.
No doubt, these live chat experiences go both ways. Wishing you a more relaxed X-MAS days
How many push-ups required to enter DC?
A key lockbox with code unlock would save the time and postage to send the key. A lockbox would eventually pay for itself vs stamp and envelope.
I thought this was about to be another Virmach complaint thread
@Ympker quite fun time you've had with those guys.
Oh well, such is life behind the helldesk.
Support is a funny one when it comes to things.
If you offer colocation and dedicated servers along with other services you will get customers who think they are your only customer and expect that their task be completed ASAP! This isn't the case in the real world.
It's great to think you can answer and resolve tickets in minutes. Sometimes this is possible. However, if you are in the middle of racking up 40 servers into a rack for your dedicated server customers are you going to bend over backwards to rack another customers server that just came in the same day? Typically not, this would go onto a task list for the next business day or two depending on the work loads.
In regards to dedicated servers being down yes, those types of requests typically would take higher priorities due to something being down.
If you do not have your own techs on site 24/7 it's quite hard for some tasks to be quicker as well. We have had this happen when our tech is on another floor on the other side of the data center doing another urgent task. Sometimes it can take 15-60 minutes to have something looked at or rebooted. Then put the data center techs who might be even slower than in house techs it can be quite a while.
This is where for anything super important customers need to have some type of plan in place redundancy, way of remote access for IPMI / power to reboot.
A lot of those issues come up more in terms of colocation over dedicated servers.
You should ask ramnode guys how they do it. Tickets are replied within minutes
24 hours on weekdays is acceptable support period
Thank you everyone for the responses. After I posted this I got really sick, some of the *cough cough if you know what I mean. I am checking the responses now. Thank you everyone.