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How can outsourced support give fast response?
There's a lot of things that that App can do and email piping can't. We have email piping anyway for customers but that's a different story.
As said the App can approve orders etc.
We mainly use the app for setting tickets to "In Progress" when we're not near a PC. It's also helpful when you have multiple people working the queue and not sure if somebody else is working on the ticket or not.
We used to be in the habit of replying to all tickets as soon as we saw them with the canned "I am looking into this" (me) or "I've escalated this to Joe" (Steve) but we've started using the "In Progress" status instead for quickness. Unfortunately, setting things to "In Progress" doesn't help our average ticket response times but it gives a better representation of resolution versus response.
To me it depends on the ticket, these days if it's something billing/sales/etc related I normally don't expect them to take care of it outside of the usual business day in their area.
Support related marked as normal for lower price hosts, probably around 4-6 hours in my opinion (though fortunately most I've dealt with has usually been under 2). For urgent such as the whole freaking node being down, I would expect at the very least an acknowledgement email between 15 to 30 minutes (probably an hour at the most).
I find that if I don't expect too much when a 5 minute SLA isn't involved, I tend to end up being impressed with some providers surpassing my expectations at times lol. But like I said, depends on the nature of the problem and the urgency.
Oddly I actually feel better when I see an auto-responder as opposed to some who don't use an auto-responder at all. Even if I know that logically there's a chance that someone human hasn't seen it yet. I guess cuz an autoresponder seems to say 'something' is working and it's not an all-hell-broke-loose scenario yet. I guess that's probably the same kind of feeling some people might get if they can actually see a status change on a ticket.
Instantly, enough said. Okay maybe not.... Less then 2 hours, but I pay you to be there for any whim I may have and it must be that second because I am Mun and I am your best customer. "Fill Mun with your name"
We have auto-responders if the ticket is not addressed or the status changed within 45 minutes (also escalates the priority and notifies us again). We also have auto responders after 5 minutes for our Contact Us queue (non-critical) and 15 minutes for our EMERGENCY! queue (provides them with my cell phone number for true emergencies).
The status change is supposed to imply that we have looked at the ticket and are either actively working on it or it is waiting for me to wake up/get to a PC. Whether or not the clients check the status or not is another story. Personally I mash the refresh button when I'm waiting for a ticket to be answered to see if the status changes or the ticket gets assigned (not sure if WHMCS displays this or not).
That's all the stats that hostbill gives me.
Question for the providers in this thread... Tickets marked as Critical or Emergency (or whatever priorities you have in your dropdown menu), do those actually get any higher priority than one marked "Low priority"? It would be nice if a ticket marked Emergency sent you an SMS or some other kind of alarm that could even wake you up if you're sleeping, but I can also understand that you might not want to do this, since I'm sure that people mark simple stuff as Emergency.
They get higher priority. However, it depends on how many tickets are open and what we have going on at the time. If there's not much load for the support staff then even low priority will be answer fast. We only prioritize if there is a queue.
@concerto49, so, you trust that your clients won't abuse it? Interesting. I mean, I know that most clients would probably use it correctly, but I can see it being an annoyance to have tickets like "How do I install wordpress" marked as Emergency.
No, we don't trust anything. We read the emergency ones first, but if we evaluate it as non-emergency we won't act on it like an emergency. Trust is a two way bridge, right? For clients to trust us, we have to trust them, but doesn't mean our trust should be abused either and it is not a blind trust.
Yes. They also get my direct phone number if they wait to long for a response to a ticket marked as "Emergency".
Per our TOS:
Additionally, clients must accept this before submitting a ticket: