|
Since its inception, a young Hosting company had
used innovative marketing methods and had achieved explosive growth. It
was able to grow from a single server Reseller to a 22 server Hosting
company in just One year. Throughout this period the company had
used Bobcares Shared Support to take care of its Tech support while the
hosting company was able to concentrate on its marketing efforts and
expand.
The company now needed to scale with its own
dedicated team to exclusively handle the company's tech department. The
company approached Bobcares with this requirement. Bobcares first
established a Dedicated Administration Facility (DAF) with a team of 3
engineers in a period of 4 days. These were experienced engineers who
had worked with various Hosting companies. They knew exactly the steps
the company needed to take at this stage when it was poised for
explosive growth.
An action plan was put forward to company
management. Servers were to be classified into various categories and
allocated a standard software configuration, Hardware and bandwidth
resource and Security configuration. An optimum number of users was
suggested for each class of servers considering a combination of
maximum profit and the best resource utilization. On approval, the team
went to work and within a month had steadily configured servers and
migrated clients till it reached the optimum level. New customers were
straight away shifted to the new servers which were built with the new
configuration. This way the company saved thousands of dollars by
completely utilizing existing resources.
Emergency channels were setup early on. All the
servers and critical services such as Web services and Email were put
on special 24x7 Server Monitoring systems. The systems were configured
to send SMS messages to the group the moment any server or service went
down. Communication channels were setup with the datacenter so that if
any server went down, the datacenter would know in less than 5 minutes.
The team knew that customers needed reassurance if any emergency arose.
Mass announcement systems were setup, so that customers got an
announcement before they had to find out.
The HelpDesk was taken over so smoothly the
customers did not even know. The team would make sure that an issue
resolution took place in less than an hour. By making the server stable
and establishing emergency procedures, customer issues had reduced to a
large extent. This enabled the team to spend more time over individual
customers, leading to rise in sales due to customer referrals.
The team did not limit itself to just answering
tickets, it needed to make itself more efficient. Efforts were put into
developing a FAQ and Knowledge Base with commonly asked technical
questions. This enabled the company to reduce the basic queries it was
getting from beginners. Reason ? The technical team knew the company
was poised for more growth. The team could save the company money if it
could handle more servers. The FAQ made it possible for the same team
to handle at least 30% more servers.
While the team had been dealing with the technical
challenges, the company could concentrate on its marketing efforts. Yet
it needed all the help it could get. While the company looked at
external sources for new customers, the technical team looked at the
internal customers. Customers who were taking more resources were
identified and referred to the sales team. They received targeted
promotion and almost 80% of such customers were converted into
Dedicated Hosting. Several others upgraded to higher plans. This was a
cache of gold the management had not even thought about.
The company has now graduated to a NOC with 100
servers and around 25000 hosting accounts. Bobcares team provided
company management with expert consultation on the NOC hardware,
Network architecture and software, thus saving thousands of dollars on
external consultancy agencies. Though the company management had
trouble digesting Outsourcing initially, now, a year later they say
that they consider the Bobcares team as part of their company
rather than an outsourced provider.
|