Getting a new customer is multiple times harder than retaining one. But customers would stay only if they receive top quality support service.

In web hosting support, slow responses and recurring issues often lead to customer attrition. That’s why quality management is crucial to build customer loyalty.

What is quality management and why is it important?

Quality management, in short, is about setting quality targets and achieving those. But its effectiveness depends on how it is implemented and practiced in an organization.

A quality assurance process can be done in a very involved or in a minimal manner. An efficient quality management system should follow a 360 degree approach.

A 360 degree quality management involves all the activities that are part of a business, ranging from hiring the staff to collecting customer feedback after service delivery.

Having an effective quality management system helps ensure that you are providing top-quality service to your customers, which is indispensable to retain them.

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What makes your customer happy?

If you want your customers to last, make them come first! The core of any quality management system should be the customer requirements.

In a service industry, quality of support provided to customers is mainly determined by these parameters:

1. Timeliness

There is nothing that delights a customer than prompt service. That makes it important to acknowledge and cater to a customer’s concern real fast.

In support industry, the response time and resolution time provided to the customers’ issues are crucial parameters to be monitored to ensure timeliness of service.

2. Accuracy

Mistakes can happen due to many reasons – be it an individual’s negligence or a software error. For instance, an accidentally executed ” rm -rf / ” command can destroy a customer’s server and end up being catastrophic to his business.

Accuracy should therefore be assured in each and every action performed for the customers and every interaction done with them.

3. No recurring issues

Nothing pisses off customers more than having to contact the support team over and over for the same issue. That’s why preventing recurrent support issues is vital to avoid customer loss.

For eg, a server restart can temporarily reduce its load, but the load can again peak in no time. Identifying the root cause – resource abuse, attacks, etc. – is important to fix the issue permanently.

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Trend in average response time since Bobcares started support

How to set quality targets?

Quality management involves identifying the activities involved in the business and setting targets for each process, based on their deliverable.

For instance, the target for an HR department would be to hire qualified personnel, quality check department would be focused on detecting and correcting problems before they affect the customer, and so on.

Here we’ll see the most important quality parameters to be considered for a support company:

1. Response time

Monitoring the response time for the service helps to know how fast you acknowledge the customer’s concern and give him an assurance of your service.

Response time targets can vary based on the SLA signed with the customer and the medium of support channel involved. For instance, a phone and chat support require instant response, compared to email support.

2. Trend of issues

Categorizing the type of issues and analyzing their trend helps to identify major issues that are to be addressed with priority. This is important to proactively avoid server failures.

For instance, a mail server IP that gets blacklisted often indicates that there could be some open vulnerability in the server that is being exploited repeatedly by attackers.

3. Testimonials

The best way to assure the support quality is to get direct customer feedback. Testimonials and thanks replies are indicative of customer delight.

Having a proper system to collect the feedback as soon as an issue is resolved, helps to know how well customers perceive our service. Areas where is a scope for improvement can be thus detected and worked on.

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Increase in % of issues resolved in one hour with Bobcares support

How to monitor and correct?

Setting the quality targets for each activity is not an easy job. Every process owner should have a very clear idea of the activities included in that process and what is expected from each.

All the quality criteria should be aligned with the organization’s overall mission, which, in-turn is formulated based on its customer requirements.

The quality objectives should be easily verifiable ones. There has to be a system to periodically measure the status of these objectives and improve upon it based on the results.

How our quality management system works

At Bobcares, we have quality targets to monitor all our activities such as vendor selection, recruitment, training, quality check, customer feedback, and so on.

With a set of quality objectives such as response time, resolution time, ticket edits, thanks reply count, etc. in place, we ensure that our customers get excellent support experience.

Using a risk-based planning approach, process owners are able to identify the probable risks for each process and take actions to prevent them or minimize their impact.

With an ongoing continual improvement plan, Bobcares’ staff improve upon their existing objectives and identify new areas where there is a scope for improvement. If you’d like know more about how 24/7 hosting support can help your business, feel free to contact us.