If you are going to provide hosting to customers, it’s vital that you have 24/7 support at their fingertips. Having excellent customer service is not only a good idea, it’s necessary to make it in the hosting world. Your business wouldn’t survive without great customer service and the better you excel at it, the more likely your business will grow.
Half of customers would say that their issues are resolved when they have good service with an actual human, making it extra important that you have actual people helping your customers rather than relying on technology for your all of the support you provide.
The best thing you can do is learn about what makes support successful in order to find areas where you could improve or to see where you are doing things right. Here are 10 ways to make your 24/7 support a success.
Communication skills
A great place to start is to look at your communication skills of your team. If you are outsourcing support, make sure you are choosing a crew that has great written and spoken skills. Communication is the main part of customer support which means you cannot lack on quality in this department.
Make sure your 24/7 support team is proficient in communication and only hire support staff that you’ve interviewed and ensured there is great communication on their end.
Channels of communication
Next, you’ll want to take a look at your channels of communication. Do you have multiple ways to reach your team? You should be able to send an instant message, make a phone call, and shoot over an email if you are efficiently managing your support staff. This helps business run more smoothly.
Multiple levels of support
The next area you should look at is your levels of support. Having multiple support tiers will allow you to have a good combination of team players that can help at a basic level or a premium level. This means that when calls come in, you can easily set them up with the right level of support to spread out the support staff’s time to help customers and meet more of your client’s demand.
This helps to avoid overwhelming too many of your upper-level support staff where a lower-level staff member could have resolved a more basic inquiry to free up premium or enhanced support levels.
Engagement models
It’s so important to be flexible and your clients are going to need your help at different times for different reasons. Between various business needs to multiple time zones, your support staff needs to be available 24/7 to help clients with their regular needs. Make sure your vendors offer different shift coverage options like multiple shifts, single shift, and 24/7 hosting support.
Certifications
Having a support staff with different levels of certifications will play to your advantage. This will make it easier to separate staff by their level of support. Having a great deal of knowledge in your support staff will come into play often. Be sure to have certifications from major IT programs like Microsoft, VMWare, Red Hat, and Parallels.
Experience will help
Having different levels of experience in customer service will be beneficial as well. Your more advanced staff members can teach inexperienced staff about customer service techniques and how to deal with contingencies with tight deadlines. Make sure you have a staff with great customer service skills to help provide support to inexperienced staff.
Other important tips
Lastly, be sure to have account management, defined resolution times, and client references. Excellent vendors should be able to provide references for you to review, while you should be able to hire an account manager that works well with you and your team for facilitating communication on regular reports and quality-control.
Then, you need to make sure there are resolutions and response times in place to keep everyone track, with 30 minutes being a typical response time and one hour being the perfect resolution timeframe.
Use these 10 ideas to make sure your 24/7 support team is a success with your clients.
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