24/7 tech support is pretty much the standard in web hosting and allied industries.

Customers will need support at 3:00 am in the morning, on a Sunday, or even on New Years eve.

But, you need your time off, and that’s why it is important to find a tech support partner – an Outsourced Support Services company that can take care of your customers when you are away.

The question then is, how do you find the best outsourced support services company for your business?

Here are the top 3 ways in which you can find the best outsourced support provider.

1. How experienced is the company?

Servers are complex machines, with complex software running on them 24/7.

Mostly they hum along quite well without any issues. But on occassion they break down with cryptic errors that doesn’t have a solution in Google, or server docs, or anywhere else.

That is when you need an experienced company on your side, who can drill down to the server logs, find the exact cause, and apply a solution before your customers can be affected.

Many companies make the mistake of hiring freelancers or less exprienced companies who end up spending hours on the issue, leading to extensive downtime for your services.

To gauge the experience of your support provider, ask them these questions:

• When was your company founded?
• What is your collective experience?
• What is the average experience of your staff ?

2. What is their staff’s qualification?

Many business class software such as RedHat, Microsoft and cPanel provide documentation to take care of server errors.

But issues in real life doesn’t always come in neat packages as shown in an FAQ. There’ll be undocumented errors, solutions that don’t work, or even incorrect “fixes” that break the server.

That is why you need server experts who can quickly distill a problem into its basic components, reconstruct the issue, and apply a fix before your customers are affected.

But that kind of knowledge isn’t easy to acquire.

For starters, the techs should have a thorough understanding of computer architecture, operating systems and networking.

The kind of knowledge you get with a degree in computer science engineering.

Why you need engineers in tech support

People who claim to be experts in a particular platform (say cPanel), but not others, usually have a superficial knowledge about systems, and that’s usually limited to what is said in the product documentation.

The danger with that is, when a serious un-documented issue happens, the techs won’t be able to resolve it, and you’ll be left hunting for emergency help somewhere else.

That is why you need to look for techs who have a solid foundation in Computer science engineering, and additional specialized knowledge in the kind of technology you are using (like Linux or VMWare).

For example., here at Bobcares, we employ only Computer science graduates with top grades, and provide them many months of additional training on internet & hosting systems.

So, when you’re considering a new provider, ask them:

• Do your techs have Engineering degrees?

3. Where are they located?

Many companies feel unsure about engaging an outsourced support company because they don’t know how they can hold the provider liable should they not deliver on their contract, or cause damages.

That’s why it’s important to have a legally bound agreement with a provider that has valid US business.

For example, Bobcares runs part of our support operations from USA under the registered company Poornam Inc. All legal contracts are signed under this company name, that guarantees our customers a 100% trustworthy association.

So, when considering a company:

• See if the company has a registered office in your country.
• See if it is a token presence or a fully operational center.

Conclusion

When outsourcing your tech support, you should do your due diligence in assessing the capabilities of your support provider. There are a hundred different things like experience, infrastructure, location and more that you can look at, but with a few core indicators you can accurately assess your support provider. Today we’ve discussed the top 3 questions you need to ask yourselves when considering a support provider.