Outsourcing support?

[Zoren]

I have thought about using outsourced support for off hours and holidays. Like others here, I haven't been able to bring myself to place my customers in others hands. With any outsourced support would come a long training period to familiarize them with your operation, offerings and ways of relating to your customers. I don't know if I can reasonably expect that from someone not dependant upon my customers satisfaction. Not all of these companies are equal. Individual employees within these companies are also a factor. Years ago I did outsourced support for several large corporations web offerings. Some techs were great and others were rude to end users or would go awol while logged into the que. I am still on the fence with outsourced support.

At my previous reseller host, they used hspheresupport.com for answering tickets. I think preschool children could have provided better support. Useless, nonsensical answers trailed by a smilie and THANKS!!. You'll see several horror stories over at wht on the topic of outsourced support. I am looking at giving bobcares a trial run. I am not quite to the point where I'm set up to need them yet, however.

If anyone uses an outsourced company, please report back on how they worked out for you.

[electricfox]

Billing:
You're right, some tickets just won't be handled through a system like this. Billing, no. And definately not sales ("are you *sure* you don't want to go with me instead??")

Christmas:
I hear you, but compared to how it was, it would be better. Maybe it would give us more of a false sense of security though.

Maybe we could even build it so that outside techs who want to work for $X per ticket could help, even if they don't host.

Legal:
Yes, there would be some legal issues with privacy and private label issues. Overall it's probably okay though.

Fees:
I like your sliding scale tickets idea, but I wonder if that's really what we want. I mean, imagine some guy with 200 customers who really doesn't have the time to support any of them, and therefore provides $400 for the ticket system every month. Sure, it would be a burden on the system, but I guess we need to decide if the money is enough to support the time for tickets themselves, or is mostly an incentive system designed to even out workload. If the latter, maybe we shouldn't even mess with money, and work on points of some sort.

I'm pretty sure that this would require some yet-undefined php ticket system, or at least an extension of one. I'm getting pretty excited about the idea though, and do appreciate the input. Who here would go for it if I were to set something like this up?

[Brangwyn]

I subscribe to the "If you want it done right, do it yourself" theory personally. ... though I'm sure if I joined your scheme I could probably make a fortune

On the fence about it though, personally with 300+ customers support just doesn't take that much out of my day that I'd even think about outsourcing it really .. Christmas well heck the odd urgent support emails a great excuse to get away sometimes

I have a feeling whilst it might work initially, people are inherintly lazy so will just "leave the tickets" for someone else to deal with and eventually everyones support will be adversely effected.

[kattouf]

Instead we all join forces and setup a super host and take over the industry!

I for one need more free time, its just not worth being there just in case a ticket comes in, its not the volume but the having to be there that is draining.

I will probably hire a vortech reseller when the time comes, a pooled system might be unworkable.

How about a system without money, where hosts sign up to work in shifts and bind themselfs contractualy to answer tickets on that shift. That way you always know there is somone there answering tickets.

We then negotiate who works when and we're sorted. Each one works 3-4 hours a day on it for example, also hosts can choose which days to work (if we have many).

That way even though we are self employed we work in shifts and can plan our lifes arround that...

Sales and billing tickets can wait untill you are available.

This system is so much easier to setup :-)

[Brangwyn]

I for one need more free time, its just not worth being there just in case a ticket comes in

And I think there lies the catch22 .. It sounds like most of you are looking to try and get more free time, and spend less time managing support, If so then personally I just don't think it will work long term no matter how you try and motivate people i.e payment for tickets.

Also remember that whomever is on say a "shift" could potentially be dealing with 5-10 Resellers ticket load at once which if say theres a server outage during that time would be absolutely nuts and probably leave you more stressed after a day of dealing with that then it would have just dealing with your own customers.

I have a PDA/Cell Phone, I can be out and about and still check my email every hour or so for tickets so I'm not tied down to being in one place just in case something happens.

[Garreg]

Yep.. agree with Brangwyn...
This is a great idea and if someone can resolve it - well.....

Problem is - most state they can't afford the time or have 'enough' knowledge to cater for their clients... which as stated makes it rather hard to see how the same people could 'collectively' cater for a pooled support area.

Here's another 'problem' (sorry just trying to be realistic here) - What if you don't like the reply another reseller gives 'your' client? and worse still if that client then decides to leave and bad name you?
Vortech themselves have had major support problems because resellers here have advised their own clients to get support direct from Vortech... thus creating mahem..... what if the resellers also do that to this proposed 'shared' system?

As I said - great idea.... would really like to see it work - but theres a huge array of 'what ifs' to solve first

[Silverbug]

I have a PDA/Cell Phone, I can be out and about and still check my email every hour or so for tickets so I'm not tied down to being in one place just in case something happens.

Sorry to be OT here but what are you usually spending a month on gprs access?

I think like Garreg said, there are a TONNE of whatif's, and personally i dont think i would want to trust (no offence) anyone else with my clients problems.

[kattouf]

Originally Posted by Brangwyn

I have a PDA/Cell Phone, I can be out and about and still check my email every hour or so for tickets so I'm not tied down to being in one place just in case something happens.

I was doing my research on this last week, might go for a new Palm maybe the T3 or Zire 72 and a new bluetooth phone, what setup have you got? but then there are PDAs with Wifi, but i want a Palm not a pocket pc which usually have both bluetooth and wifi

[Brangwyn]

Originally Posted by Silverbug

Sorry to be OT here but what are you usually spending a month on gprs access?

I think like Garreg said, there are a TONNE of whatif's, and personally i dont think i would want to trust (no offence) anyone else with my clients problems.

Not muchy, Vodafones 15MB a month plan which I think is like $25 but I might drop that back to the 3MB Plan and just pay for overages. Generally only use GPRS if I'm totally out of Wellington, if I'm in town I just turn on wi-fi and use Cafenet instead of GPRS (www.cafenet.co.nz - $20 for 70MB Data)

I was doing my research on this last week, might go for a new Palm maybe the T3 or Zire 72 and a new bluetooth phone, what setup have you got? but then there are PDAs with Wifi, but i want a Palm not a pocket pc which usually have both bluetooth and wifi

One of these http://www.carrierdevices.com/products.php?id=9 - I'd go with the CDMA version which is a lot faster data access wise becuase it's 3G (Mines only 2.5G) but don't really want to change providers. And at the end of the day GPRS speeds are fine for just syncing your PDA remotely and downloading a few emails etc.

[Silverbug]

ah ic, pitty cafenet is only within wellington area, and not auckland.