When I joined Bobcares, we had only Shared Team technical support plans. A “Shared Team” in Bobcares handles many clients simultaneously and all with equal priority. Basically, by sharing techs with others, web hosts were able to cut down their running cost without affecting the quality of technical support.
It used to be fun those days, when all of us at Bobcares worked as a single team for all our customers. All of us knew even the intricate details of every customer, and hence we were able to deliver personalized support for each one of them. Further on, things started turning out to be a little challenging, as our customer base was always on the rise.
Thus, it became necessary to divide the Bobcares Tech Team into multiple teams. This made it easy for the techs to retain the personal touch, as each team was now handling only a few web hosts. When our customer base further grew, we moved on to create smaller shared teams to handle new customers. which was ever on the rise. As the customer base increased, we realized the need for providing dedicated tech plans to provide assistance to large web hosts and data center customers.
As years passed, Bobcares grew to a large company with over 300 engineers. Dedicated Teams became our front line service, which were handling many a data center and very large web hosting companies around the world. By then, I was already a member of one of the Dedicated Teams of Bobcares.
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Support techs are the ones who are listening to the end users of the web hosts. Hence, they are the best people to provide guidelines to the CEO’s and owners of web hosting companies. |
We continued with the Shared Team support plans and the number of plans increased over the years. Moreover, the Bobcares office at Phoenix also started providing US based shared phone support, which became added to our list of services.
My second stint with shared teams began when I got promoted to the role of an Executive Team Member. The Shared Team has grown tremendously and handles more than half of our total customer base today.
Every shared team handles all sizes of web hosts: Startup web hosts with 1 server to web hosts having up to 100 servers.
Then came a change in the way that our Shared Teams were being managed. We pulled in senior engineers, with expertise in handling large data centers and web hosts to lead the shared teams. The reason behind this move was to bring in the experience & expertise of these engineers to benefit the small web hosts.
If you look at it, all small and medium size web hosts require assistance & guidance in growing their business. Support techs are the ones who are listening to the end users of the web hosts. Hence, they are the best people to provide these guidelines to the CEO’s and owners of web hosting companies.
Let me illustrate this with an example:
Suppose that a small cPanel web host gets a support ticket requesting for installation of Ruby on Rails. Instead of just completing the installation on the server and closing the ticket, the support tech also provides more information about “Ruby on Rails” to the web host owner.
The owner, with the guidelines provided, changes the marketing strategy of the company such that “Ruby on Rails” is given special mention in the homepage of the company site. In no time, the web host starts getting more customers who were looking for hosts that specifically supported “Ruby on Rails”. As you can see, the effort involved was less, when compared to the returns.
The Bobcares Shared Team Plan customer-base is now seeing a sudden surge in the number of customers signing up. With new goals and expectations set, we’ll work ahead to get the Shared Team Plans turn out to be our best selling service.
About the Author:
Sojish Krishnan, Sr. Engineer at Bobcares.com is an Executive Team Member. Sojish has worked in Bobcares for over five years and is a passionate advocate of superior Customer support. He graduated Bachelors in Computer Science in 2001. He is also a speaker in conferences related to the Web Hosting industry. Sojish loves to play table tennis, and also possess a never-ending desire towards biking.
Ya there is alot to know about the web hosting industry.And sometimes it’s hard to find good information on the web. Thanks for the good input.