Your hosting business thrives on word of mouth regarding your support. Almost every web hosting business has presence on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Poor support results in bad reputation which adversely affects your business. So it is of paramount importance to build an army of support staff equipped with the right kind of arsenal.
24/7 support via
- Phone
- Live Chat
- Help Desk Ticketing panel
- Knowledge base articles as first level of support
A skilled support agent should have a lucid linguistic style. Effective reading, writing and speaking skills are a must. Always hire knowledgeable support technicians who can give specialist advice to customers and help to optimize and performance tune their hosting solutions.
Soft skills is a major requirement. After All, your customers should not get a vibe that they are communicating with a team of highly skilled robots. Your support team should be approachable and empathetic. They have to understand the customer’s point of view. Technically correct solutions to user problems are critical, but they will not by themselves guarantee satisfied customers.
Create a lot of useful, customer friendly, knowledge base articles in your website or link it with your user account panel. When I say customer-friendly it means articles that can be read and understood by ordinary people. A kb filled with high tech jargon is not going to help. People will skip over the contents and go straight to the support chat/email which defeats the purpose.
The idea of maintaining a KB is to take the load off from your support staff and make your customers self-reliant. The best kind of support is the one which empowers your customers. And it is cost effective too.
Another step forward in creating knowledge base is to record video tutorials of the same KB articles. People love visual aids. A cool, neatly crafted do-it-yourself video is going to be a definite win.
Create an internal kb for your support team. Organize them for different departments like billing, hardware, emergency support etc. This will save valuable time and energy.
