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host provider support. In house VS. Outsourcing.
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host provider support. In house VS. Outsourcing.

What do you prefer a hosting provider with in house support staff, or an out sourced support company, or a mix of both. Or does it carry any weight with you at all, as long as the support is good?

Comments

  • In house.

  • In house.

  • In house of course. Outsourced support is often from India etc and causes problems in translation normally.

  • haryhary Member

    in house always handle with love <3

  • wychwych Member

    In house.

  • ZeastZeast Member

    In houserino.

  • You can't effectively outsource this. Most of these so called outsourced support companies pile dozens of companies support into the hands of a few ill-experienced, ill-mannered contractors who are paid pennies. They have no incentive to do a good job.

    We've acquired many companies over the years and I have seen almost all the major outsourced services. Customers being told to delete their website and upload it because they had a php errror, botched migrations, VPS's being reinstalled over the top of customer data.

    Never, ever outsource support.

    Thanked by 1jzabel
  • Most outsourced support I've seen are just forwarding machines. They buy time for you and that's it.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    concerto49 said: Most outsourced support I've seen are just forwarding machines. They buy time for you and that's it.

    I am suddenly inspired to write a WHMCS module that provides the illusion of support. It randomly chooses an "escalation path" that takes 8 hours and reports it to the user, over a course of steps. The actual responses are randomized. Here is an example:

    after 30 minutes:

    1. Thank you for contacting us. Give me a little to take a look.

    45 minutes later:

    1. I have a call in to L2. I'll report back shortly.

    1 hour later:

    1. Sorry for the delay. We had a report about that server earlier and resolved that issue, but this appears unrelated. Still investigating. Thanks for your patience.

    1.5 hours later:

    1. I've escalated this to our L3 support, as I think this is something they will take a look. They will contact you shortly.

    etc.

  • Release the source - I'm sure we'd all love this module.

  • Thank you for the premium support sir!

    Thanked by 1GIANT_CRAB
  • I rarely use support anyway, so I don't care, and especially if it's something like a seedbox or testing box, the cheaper the better.

  • HBAndreiHBAndrei Member, Top Host, Host Rep

    In-house of course.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    In-house. No doubt about it.

  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    in house

  • This question shouldn't of needed to be asked as it's easy to know what people prefer.

  • raindog308 said: I am suddenly inspired to write a WHMCS module that provides the illusion of support. It randomly chooses an "escalation path" that takes 8 hours and reports it to the user, over a course of steps. The actual responses are randomized.

    Most people would see this as awesome support :)

  • jzabeljzabel Member

    @IThinkUFailed said:
    This question shouldn't of needed to be asked as it's easy to know what people prefer.

    This was more of a follow up to another post I have regarding 100tb.com

  • BruceBruce Member

    @MarkTurner said:
    Never, ever outsource support.

    I don't disagree, but ...

    you get what you pay for. surely there's decent support companies available to provide prompt L1 support

    poor support is likely worse than waiting a while for good support, except if it's urgent.

    employees come with their own problems. often its better to subcontract someone than to directly employ. many EU countries are tough places to employ people (can't easily replace poor staff)

    to run a decent service at LET prices, there's little margin to spend on a big support team. better to have a small but good team. my interest in this topic - I'm looking at options to increase my support team (in the right way, quality and price are both important)

  • jenokjenok Member, Host Rep

    raindog308 said: I am suddenly inspired to write a WHMCS module that provides the illusion of support. ...

    lol, nice idea.

    and for the main question: in house for sure

  • jhjh Member

    I would never give my business to a company that outsources customer service, be it a hosting company, utility company, financial company etc. That said, I can understand that low end hosts need to cut costs to stay competitive.

    I do know of one hosting company that outsource a decent chunk of their support. I don't know who they pay but I've gone through their tickets a few times and I've been impressed with their techs' language and technical skills.

  • DewlanceVPSDewlanceVPS Member, Patron Provider
    edited June 2015

    Support from home.


    Outsource = Less trusted

  • Bruce said: you get what you pay for. surely there's decent support companies available to provide prompt L1 support

    One company we acquired (shared hosting) was paying $4000/month for dedicated round the clock support, from quite a well respected support company.

    Dedicated team - we found working on other companies. We found copy/paste from other company's policies being quoted at our customers.

    Dreadful

    I can say out of 30-40 companies we have acquired that had outsourced support, not one of them were delivering a quality support service in any stretch. The responses were stupid, ill thought through and completely wrong.

    The companies delivering the services were literally the top 10 providers of outsourced support.

  • IshaqIshaq Member

    @raindog308 said:

    Already exists, it's called Escalation Rules.

    http://docs.whmcs.com/Support_Ticket_Escalations

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Ishaq said: Already exists, it's called Escalation Rules.

    But that is just routing tickets to actual humans. In other words, that is honest.

    This would be automated, random "we're working on it", "we're investigating", "we're escalating" messages, like those you get form outsourced support :-)

    I'm not being serious here. Or am I...

  • Ishaq said: Already exists, it's called Escalation Rules.

    It's not the same thing.

  • 4n0nx4n0nx Member

    when I found out about name.com I contacted their support to ask for renewal price of a domain. The support asked me "what website are you looking at?".

    No way I'll ever use name.com after that.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    Bruce said: you get what you pay for. surely there's decent support companies available to provide prompt L1 support

    I'll believe it when I see it.

    Thanked by 1MarkTurner
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