This is my view on 24/7 support. My company provides 24/7 by ticket support. We do not have a live chat feature (yet) and so we use ticket support. I have staff members from all over. Three members of staff live in the USA, and two live in europe.
I agree and I label tech support in the same way the reason for this is that as I am across multiple industries both in and out of computing however if for example myself or anyone here for that matter who owns a hosting company starts to talk over server config in detail and command line we would probably be talking at a similar level knowledge wise or at least have common ground.
However what tends to happen with live support via phone as well as web based is that tech savvy engineers tend not to have the same skills as that of a sales person, by that I mean there are different strategies used as well as fine tuning something or what you are describing to that person. Of which i presume you are all aware.
A lot of tech savvy engineers I know tend to lack that ability in real time and those that are worth their weight in gold prefer to sit down and spend time on those 15 to 30 minuet responses that cover all the bases, not leaving the customer with “but how do I...?, what do you mean?, no I didn’t mean that!” are usually for most industries and especially phone based support, locked behind on an in-house secondary line to aid their sales staff in dealing with the more advanced issues to which again the internal knowledge board is of no use.
There are a few large companies that do this well an example being Apple Inc (in most cases) and O2 (British telephone/internet company) and there are hosts that do this very poorly and respond with ether 1 line answers or “I don’t understand what you mean by...” an example of these being UK2 and Hostgator both of which I have had to aid friends and businesses that know me personally who made the wrong choice before I entered the industry, and the first waited 4days for a response and the second received a 5 word answer to which was a well known excuse used by overselling webhosts.
Again support is key to any industry but there is a balance, I always love talking to a tech savvy support technician when I have to, and often when on the phone with O2 again using this example I am always placed directly through to a network engineer in the uk 24/7 if I ask for it and I have before discussed the entire network topology of south west England (I know I’m sad
) as well as the different internal and external network layouts that would benefit myself and my business.
But never before have I know a company that offers that level of tech support but for an industry such as hosting a middle ground will suffice however waiting “a little” longer for a response is good if it is accurate and detailed enough to leave the user without question, otherwise your support needs to be very quick.
Ether method works to some degree, but I think ticket support is the most common and best practiced method around, correct me if I’m wrong but live support is always used for sales and very trivial support requests especially for larger hosts. Anything not quickly solvable is usually directed to ticket support.
Just my :twocents:worth but its an area that sets smaller hosts apart from those larger oversellers within the industry
