Running a business isn’t easy. There are a hundred things you need to take care of. It includes billing, sales, marketing, tech support, store management, and more.

That is why many companies outsource at least a part of their business activities to an external company.

Outsourced service providers usually have two models of service:

• Shared Support
• Dedicated Support

In Shared support model, your work will be done by a specialist who shares their time with other companies as well. This model allows you to save costs, but doesn’t give you the flexibility to change the method of working, response times, etc.

But in Dedicated Support, an expert is assigned exclusively to your company. You can define how this person should interact with your customers, how fast they should respond, or anything else that is unique to your business.

So, a way to define dedicated support is:

Dedicated Support definition

Dedicated support is an outsourced support model where the support provider assigns an expert (or experts) exclusively for your company. A dedicated support person works very much like your own employee, but you do not have to hire, train, manage payroll, provide infrastructure, manage leaves, or perform any other function that is required for a regular in-office employee.

Is Dedicated Support the best fit for you?

Here at Bobcares, we provide Server Management services and end-customer Technical Support to web hosts, digital marketers and other online businesses.

The Dedicated Support plan is our most popular support model, and the most common reasons to choose this plan are:

• Customizability – Some of our customers need customer tickets answered in 15 minutes, rather than the industry standard of 1 hour. Some others need server provisioning as a higher priority than tech support requests. These do not fit into a shared support model.
• High support volume – Many companies use our services to take care of end-customer support requests, but there are others who need monitoring and alert management done with equal importance. In a farm of 10 or more servers, alerts alone can constitute up to 100 issues day, which can be pretty costly in a per instance shared support model.
• Predictability in cost – When hiring dedicated support engineers, you know the per month cost. It’s like paying the salary. There won’t be a volume based spike in cost as can happen in shared support.
• Unique infrastructure configuration – Some of our customers have highly customized server systems. Our dedicated admins work exclusively on these systems and become intimately familiar with each component and quicks of it. In this way, when an issue happens, we immediately know what could be wrong, and can fix it in a few minutes.

How to choose a good Dedicated Support team

Finding a reliable and qualified dedicated support team can be quite a challenge.

You’ll need someone who knows your business technology, knows how to take care of your customers, and is reliable.

Here’s a handy list of the top 3 qualities you need to look for:

Is it a person or a company?

Individuals (eg. freelancers) can be unpredictable. They might get sick, could become unreachable, or just vanish one day without a trace.

On the other hand, companies won’t vanish one fine day. Even if one person quits or is unavailable, they’ll have a backup option.

Companies have the manpower to offer 24/7 monitoring & support, which means you no longer need to sleep with one eye open. A tech company will have enough experts around (collective expertise) to quickly resolve complex issues that might come up.

When choosing a support team,

• Check how long this company has been in existence. The longer a company has been in the industry, the more mature their systems will be to deliver 24/7 service.
• Look at their reviews in niche industry forums (eg. web hosting forums).

How experienced is the support company?

The benefits of contracting a company for DSE services goes beyond availability.

A good outsourced support provider will be able to advice you on the best practices in the industry based on their experience in managing hundreds of other clients.

Which brings us to the question about experience.

If your support company has several years (or decades) of experience in your business, you’ll gain access to time-tested insights into how best to organize and run your business.

You no longer need to do trial and error on setting up new systems or implementing a new policy. Your support team will tell you what works best based on real world examples.

So, when choosing a support team,

• Look at how long this company has been in existance.
• Look for a company that has specific expertise in your business technology (eg. Suse Linux, Windows 2016, etc.)
• Ask for a free consultation on how to resolve your business problems. If you get insightful, practical advice, you know you are in the right company.

What are the qualifications of the support team?

These days vendors provide extensive documentation to resolve day-to-day server issues.

Suse Linux, Red Hat, Windows, IIS – all these have good docs, but no amount of documentation can cover all possible issues that can occur in real life.

Suggested fixes may not work. There won’t be a relevant doc for your specific issue. Or the doc could be too hard to understand.

That is why you need your support engineers to be an expert who has more than a superficial knowledge about your business technology.

Your DSE should have a fundemental understanding of how computer systems work, how operating systems are built, the differences between them, and how to build one from scratch.

In short, you need your support person to be a Computer Science Engineer, who can deep dive into a problem and resolve the issue with or without docs.

When choosing a support team,

• Ask if the engineer is a Computer Science Engineering graduate.
• Ask for the work experience and resume.
• Request a free consultation to evaluate the knowledge of the engineers before you hire them.

Conclusion

Dedicated support is an outsourced support model where the support provider assigns an expert (or experts) exclusively for your company. Today we’ve seen what kind of companies use a dedicated support model, and what you need to look for when selecting a team.