Support During Holidays

[Harry]

Well with the holidays underway, I thought of an interesting topic.

This goes for hosting business owners. How does your business run within the holidays?
Do you still offer support?
Are the response times still roughly the same?

I know some places don't have support tech's around, because of the holidays eg. New years and Christmas. :smash:

 

[Artashes]

It would be sure interesting to know which companies do not keep their support techs around during holidays so that people can stay away.

During the holidays I expect someone to be on duty. No alcohol, either. Tough? Maybe, but a lot of client's well being depends on it.

 

[Kevin K]

We treat the holidays as any other day. Our sales and support staff are still on duty at full rotation. With an online business like web hosting I feel their are no holidays when you have to offer 24/7 support and try and sell a service.

If you are on duty during the holidays your customers and potential customers will notice. Over the last few years we receive so many replies that they cannot believe how fast the support was on a holiday and so on. Customers love that feeling of knowing someone is their watching their service when most companies are not even open.

If you go the extra mile you customers will notice without a doubt and that feeling of peace of mind they will have will go a long way. :thumbup:

 

[ldcdc]

I'd have no issue with a company having a somewhat reduced staff during the holidays, but someone should be there to take care of things. It's quite likely that support won't be as busy as in regular business days, so from that POV it makes sense to adjust the manpower. There's always a balance to be reached. All that the company must do is find the right one.

Just my personal opinion of course.

 

[Rob]

The business operates as it does on any other day. We still operated 24/7 support thought Christmas. We did however reduce the amount of sales staff on Christmas Eve and Day.

Our response times were still the same and only a few sales tickets noticed a slight delay by around 5-6 minutes. Support tickets were still answered and resolved promptly.

 

[$alesMan]

We turned off LiveHelp but we still answered tickets on our iPhones and all of our support techs were near the computer incase we had a crash or something that needed attention. The sales team with an exception for the manager (me) was off as well. I stayed on livehelp and redirected clients to send a ticket if they started a support chat. And I'd say the response time was better then normal (normaly being 10-15 min) as it wasn't very bussy at all. Mostly clients wanting to check if we realy have 24/7/365 support.

 

[1Host.com]

Gotta be covered 24/7/365. Not everyone is celebrating Christmas around the world anyway.....

 

[depache]

i spent my Christmas eve with migration. how ever support request are minimum

 

[dbihosting]

If you are offering 24/7/365 support. You had better deliver or expect a lot of customers to move their accounts.

 

[CrazyTech]

Maybe I am a little old fashioned, but I turned off support save for what I label emergency tickets, meaning services are down. Everything else was answered the following morning. All monitoring goes to me anyway, so I can handle whatever goes down. That's the advantage of being a small business right now, I realize this scenario may be a little more difficult to deal with otherwise, though.

 

[ANMMark]

Our company has limited support on the immediate surrounding days, and we are closed on the actual days of the holiday. We're able to keep our SLA this way, because we're never closed more than 24 hours.

 

[romes]

We offer support on holidays, but support is kind of limited. We try to keep response times the same. Its good to offer support during the holidays, becuase you never know when a client will need normal help, to urgent help.

 

[$alesMan]

Our company has limited support on the immediate surrounding days, and we are closed on the actual days of the holiday. We're able to keep our SLA this way, because we're never closed more than 24 hours.

Exactly what I would do if clients would be ok with it. However they want 24-7 so thats what they get.

 

[Matthew]

While I was working in the hosting business I worked from home in my home office. On Christmas I used to get SMS alerts for tickets and would respond right away... but I wouldnt spend the day at the computer. As we promised 24/7/365 (or 24/7/366 on a leap year) we had to deliver.

If I were to go back in to hosting I would probably encourage users to only submit high priority tickets where possible.

 

[miKael]

There's another side of holidays, as I guess that fewer people need support on these days.

 

[Rob]

We now have our servers, connections etc managed by our upstream providers as well as some of our own staff. It means we can concentrate more staff on the support rather than monitoring the network. Thus we can provide the same level of support throughout the year regardless of holidays.

 

[saint71]

We had support staff on call and 2 in office during the holidays.

 

[KickButtHost]

I offer it but with less staffing. It works out, there seem to be less tickets anyhow..

 

[HostingAmerica]

I offer it but with less staffing. It works out, there seem to be less tickets anyhow..

+1 to that comment. You have to provide the service you sold to your customers. Not everyone celebrates Christmas and computers certainly do not. We've found that volume drops significantly on holidays, however.

 

[kylebionhosting]

I've seen a lot of companies outsource their tech support to handle this problem.