Web Hosting Phone Support is a MUST
7th July 2011 - Posted By James Parmee Morris

Webhosting is a volatile and sparse market, by not having phone support you could be loosing out on customers who are struggling to place an order on your site that may easily be resolved by actually speaking to someone. We have many callers speak to our agents about how they can make their yearly renewal payment because most customers simply do not have the time to fuss around finding details for billing systems and working it out themselves, they call us, quote their domain and the payment is taken there and then. More revenue generated.

A lot of larger web hosting companies offer telephone services which adds to the companies authenticity and sets them apart from other companies. It is often a misconception having 24/7 outsourced telephone support is expensive, but it isn't always especially if the outsource company has the back end systems to integrate in to companies of all shapes and sizes and have agents able to handle every single company with ease, just like us at PSW.

Although it is important that you are not simply directing customers to your website again. If say the customer wants to make payment on an invoice, the last thing the customer wants to hear is someone advising to login to their account to make that payment. This is all too common and often enough to infuriate a customer to move to a competitor.

Another one is support, whilst ticket support is so much easier to manage and is usually significantly cheaper than telephone or live chat support, when a customer finds their site goes offline at 3am they want to speak to someone instantly, every minute that goes past after logging a ticket is making the customer more and more furious, give it 15 minutes and the customer is now doubting someone is checking the tickets, any longer and it is likely the customer demands a phone number for future issues, decline giving one and the customer may likely go to a competitor that does offer phone support for any future eventualities they just faced, even if its 99.99% unlikely it will happen again.

This could easily be resolved by having 24/7 telephone support acknowledging and logging the issue, as well as giving an update of any known issues. On a side note, something we do that other companies may also find beneficial to reduce costs is an IVR status update. When a customer calls one of our client companies our systems automatically check their server status pages, if there are any known issues we relay this via an automated voice making the customer aware we know of the issue, apologizing, and advising we are working to resolve this ASAP. This is usually enough to encourage the customer to hang up, and thus, not having to pay for staff to take the call especially on global issues.

However, the biggest one as I have mentioned above are customers who have checked your site out, love it, placing their order, and suddenly they don't understand what you mean by "update your name servers or create new domain", the customer, needing an answer now, looks for a phone number. If you don't have a phone number, the customer will get confused and more than likely you've just lost that order. If they could call someone, they could easily explain what option to select and assist them through the rest of the order. The sum you just paid for the call has converted in to an annual contract worth 100* more.

Whilst phone support can be a bigger cost than ticket support, it is usually a worthwhile investment.

You can view our Web Hosting Customer Service plans by clicking here.

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