Every business comes to a point when it must hire extra staff to support its growth.

Some hire staff inhouse, while others contract an external company to take care of its billing, marketing, tech support, and more.

There are two popular models of working for outsourced service providers:

• Dedicated support – A support engineer works exclusively for your company. You get 100% customized support and don’t have to worry about cost over-runs.
• Shared support – The support tech who works for you also works for other companies. This time sharing model allows you to cut costs.

Which support model should you choose? Shared or Dedicated?

Here at Bobcares, we provide server management services and while-labeled end-customer support for web hosts, digital marketers and other online businesses.

We deliver these services in both Shared Support model and Dedicated Support model.

Here’s a break down of the deciding factors of our customers to choose either of these models.

Why choose dedicated support

Dedicated support is our most popular support model because it allows personalization of service very much like using your own staff, but without any of the headaches assocaited with it (eg. hiring, training, payroll management, office management, etc.)

These are the top reasons for our customers to choose dedicated support:

1. Personalization

Many companies have a unique way of working. They would need a response sent to customers within 15 minutes, or need to follow-up through a survey after tech issue resolution.

These kind of “extras” are not usually supported in shared service model.

In dedicated support model, our customers are free to use the time of our experts in any way they choose. This helps our customers maintain their unique brand personality in support interactions and other related functions.

2. Complex procedures

Some companies require logging in via VPNs or placing outbound calls as part of support resolutions.

These are uncommon procedures, and will not fit a time sharing model like Shared Support.

In contrast, dedicated support provides the maneuvering space for support engineers to execute complex procedures in exactly the way our customers want.

3. High support volume

Our customers include web hosts, web designers and data centers. Many of these companies have hundreds of servers, which needs to be monitored 24/7.

These alerts alone can run up to over a hundred a day, which can prove to be pretty costly in a Per Instance Shared Support price model.

Whereas the Dedicated Plan supports unilimited ticket volume and supports un-common support needs like server deployments, proactive server auditing, etc.

4. Unique or customized technology

These days, many companies use customized technology stacks to deliver services that are more efficient and feature rich than their competition.

The down side is that many of these systems tend to be complex and hard to manage.

Our dedicated support model fits well into supporting these kinds of systems. Our engineers 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.

5. Predictable cost

When there’s a sudden surge of tickets (eg. due to server migrations, security incidents, etc.), the per instance model of Shared Support can cause a surge in costs.

In ontrast, with dedicated support, your costs always remain the same month after month.

Why choose shared support

Shared support works best when you have a low volume of ticket and your systems or procedures are common in the industry.

Many of our customers who use this model are either startups or use popular server administration software.

Here are the top reasons to choose Shared Support:

1. Low support volume

Some of our customers are start up companies who doesn’t have a big support volume.

They use our services to provide quick response to customers even when they are not around.

2. 24/7 coverage

Our customers include web hosts, digital marketers, web designers and other such 24/7 services.

So, people keep calling them at all hours which can be hard to attend especially if it’s at night, or while they are travelling.

Our support team provides an easy way to ensure 24/7 presence while our customers are out of office.

3. Escalated support

Having an expert on call can be quite handy when you’re running a complex operation such as web hosting.

A popular way our customers use our services is to escalate complicated issues to our support engineers, while they take care of regular tech support issues.

4. First-line support

While some use shared support as a method of issue escalation, others use it the opposite way.

We take care of 99% of the support issues, and those that require special attention (eg. selling extra services) is escalated to our customer.

In this way our customers do not have to monitor the support queue, and can use their time more efficiently.

Summary

Outsourced support providers deliver support in 2 models – Shared and Dedicated. Shared support is ideal to manage low volume, standard configuration support desks, while Dedicated support allows greater personalization and support for complex systems/procedures. Today, we’ve seen the differences between the two and what kind of support will be ideal for you based on your needs.