Running a business can be hard.

And it can be especially hard for small companies that doesn’t have a big staff strength.

As an SMB owner, you’re always pressed for time. From sales & billing to product development & marketing, everything waits for your attention.

But when paying customers call for support, you cannot put them on hold. You just have to put down everything, and take the call.

Frequent disruptions such as this can take a toll on productivity, and thereby on profitability.

Which is why many companies outsource their tech support.

The advantages are obvious:

• 24/7 availability – Support call at 2 am on Christmas eve? No worries, the support provider will take care of it. Result – Customer loyalty.
• Better expertise – Specialized support companies rely on a pool of experts to solve every technical challenge. Result – Good reputation.
• Save time & Focus better – You’ll have more time to make better features for your customers. Result – Market edge.
• Save money – Since support providers split their cost among many companies such as your’s, you get 24/7 support at a fraction of the real cost. Result – Better profts.

So, how do you choose the right support partner?

How can you retain your brand identity even while using an external support provider?

Here at Bobcares, we’ve put a lot of thought into it, precisely because we are in the business of providing 100% white labeled support for web hosting and allied companies.

From what we’ve learned over 16 years, here are the top 3 things you need to look out for:

1. Location of first line support

A big part of delivering transparent support is to choose a support provider who talks like you, so that callers feel they are talking to your own team.

Here at Bobcares, we make this happen by placing our frontline Phone Support team in Phoenix, Arizona.

They are the tech support voice for our customers, and provide a friendly, first line response.

Keeping costs in check & ensuring quality

All said, costs can quickly escalate if we place the entire tech support operations in Phoenix, and the support cost will be too high for our SMB customers.

Which is why we place all the costly backend heavy lifting work in India, where college educated, rigorously trained computer engineers manage servers, and respond to support emails.

This way we do not compromise on quality, while keeping costs low.

2. Support for VPN based administration

If you are a VPS or Cloud hosting provider, your customers will have access to server logs.

It’ll not look good to see tech support IPs originating from any location other than your own registered office.

That is why, here at Bobcares, we use VPNs to login to customer servers and ticketing system.

We help our customers setup VPN servers in their office network, and then connect our admin interfaces and browsers to use that network’s IP.

This way, the access logs, login logs, email headers and IPs logged in the ticketing system will all show our customer’s office IP address, and not our IPs.

3. Support customization

Some companies like to send quick short responses, while others like to provide a thoroughly researched resolution in the first response.

Similarly your customers will be used to a particular kind of support interaction, which you’d want to continue with your new support team.

That is why you should find a company that is willing to work in a way you like – be it customized response times or the verbosity of replies.

Here at Bobcares, our Support Engineers work based on customized SLAs, like 30 minute response,  3 hour resolution, and more.

We even take care to customize our signatures and greetings to make sure it matches the mails sent out by our customers.

Conclusion

Private label support (aka White label support) is not just a matter of changing the company name in support tickets. For true seamless integration, the new support team should be able to adopt the support culture of the company. Today we discussed 3 key factors that can affect transparent support, and how we deliver it.