Support plays an important role in the hosting industry. So if you are a web host, it is important that you ensure quality in the support provided to your customers.

Nowadays, a variety of communication media are provided to customers to interact with their web hosts like, Email/HelpDesk support, Chat support, Phone support etc. This article covers a few points that web hosts should focus on to ensure quality in their email/helpdesk support.

Organize your helpdesk!

If you are not using a helpdesk (which would be very rare), start using one. Identify the areas where you might get requests and have a separate email address /department for each of those areas.

In most cases, the support department would be available 24X7. There are hosts who route all the requests to the support department, as they are available 24X7. Please note you are reducing the efficiency of your technical support by doing this, especially if the ticket flow is quite high.

Have a separate queue/email address for each department and make sure that the customers are aware and educated well about all the departments. Redirecting all mails/requests to the technical support team is not recommended.

Let the customer know when they can expect a reply.

Customers are of different types. Some need instant replies and some may not. Let your customers know when they can expect a reply from the support team.

You can either use an auto-response mentioning when their ticket will be taken care of, or you can publish your guaranteed response time in your company website. If any of the departments (eg: sales, billing etc) is not working 24X7, this should also be properly conveyed to your customers.

Prioritize issues

It is good to have an option in your ticketing system that allows customers set priorities for their issues. Ticketing systems like Kayako support this option and you can even set SLAs for issues, based on their priority.

This will help the support team to prioritize issues and handle them properly. Thus, urgent issues will be addressed much faster than a regular issue.

Resolution given to the customer.

The support team should have enough technical competency to handle your systems and answer customer queries properly. With respect to the technical support team, a few things that you should look for are:

• Technical Expertise
• Industry Exposure
• Good understanding of your business and your customer’s business.
• Promptness, speed and accuracy.

Quality of Reply

As far as email support is concerned, the end product that is reaching your customer, is the reply!! So it is quite important to ensure that top quality replies are sent to customer’s. A few things that should be ensured in replies are:

• Good language
• Politeness
• Clarity in points conveyed
• Customer Focus

So, how can you actually ensure quality in the replies?

Give clear instructions to your support team on what you expect in their replies. Monitor and verify their replies periodically. This might not be possible for you to do all the time, as you will need to take care of the marketing and other business activities as well.

In that case, choose a company with a well established quality verification system in place so that, the monitoring and correction part will be ensured, by them.

Give regular and constructive feedback to your support team on areas of improvement. This is very important. Unless they know where they stand, they won’t be able to make further improvements.

Conclusion

Build a good system by hiring the right people! Give them proper instructions, monitor them and give periodic feedback to ensure that quality support is being delivered to all your customers.

Also, update your support system from time to time so that it meets the changing requirements of your customers!!