Seven Deadly Sins of Providing Customer Support

Providing customer support for your hosting company, or any other company for that matter, is a tricky endeavor. You have to make sure you give the customer what he/she wants without delay. This isn’t always an easy task.

Handling the support of a hosting company on your own may lead to many potential issues. Here’s a look at the seven biggest, which might as well be known as the seven deadly sins of providing customer support.

Long Wait Times

Sure, your staff gets to each caller/message in the queue within a few minutes. Maybe your goal is to get to each person within 10 minutes simply because it’s achievable. However, a few minutes or ten minutes is far too long for someone to wait. In fact, more than one minute and you’ll likely have an irritated customer.

Your support needs to be so quick that the customer doesn’t have time to wonder what could be taking so long. Whether it’s phone or online chat support, it should be fast. There’s a bit more leeway with ticket or email support, but you should still be rather quick to reply.

Self-Service Support After Login Only

If you want to make support easier on your team, you need a self-service option for customers. However, you don’t want to force them to log in just to access a knowledge base or FAQ. Instead, make it an easy solution they can get to fast and navigate with ease.

Not Branding Your Support Properly

Whether you decide providing customer support is too much and you outsource it or you go ahead with doing it yourself, branding has to be done right. Nobody wants to feel like they are being taken to an entirely new website to ask questions or find the information they need. Make sure your entire support system includes proper branding, such as logos, colors and messaging to ensure your customers feel they are still working with you.

Only Offering Ticket Support

If you want customers to start looking into your competition, offer just ticket support. This type of support isn’t the best choice and most customers will not prefer to submit a ticket and play the waiting game. They need answers and they need them now.

Whether you add just live chat or just phone to your ticket system, you need at least one other option. It’s best to offer phone, live chat and ticket support, along with a good knowledge base. This gives you a wide array of options and will appeal to all customers, no matter their preference for support.

Not Fixing the Issue

There’s nothing worse than having to call back or get back on the chat because the problem never got fixed. Usually, when issues customers bring to your attention are not getting fixed it’s due to an overworked support staff trying to get through a call/chat/ticket and onto the next.

While it’s important for your support staff to have a sense of urgency, the customer’s needs trump urgency. They need to make sure the problem has been fixed before letting the customer go.

Only Offering Self-Service Support

A knowledgebase is a great option to offer for support. However, if this is the only type of support you offer, it’s a big problem. Even if you add in support on Twitter or Facebook, it’s still not enough. In the world of hosting, if you don’t offer every support option under the sun, you’re behind the times.

Support Hours

Have you noticed that most companies offer 24/7/365 support? Do you only plan to offer support from 9am to 5pm or any other limited number of hours? If so, you’re committing one of the most deadly sins of providing customer support out there.

It’s okay to only offer phone support for 12 to 14 hours per day, but there has to be a 24/7 option for customers to get an answer any time of the day. What if their website suddenly crashes in the middle of the night right before a huge marketing campaign or some PR event happens? Do you think they will be happy if they cannot get the issue fixed ASAP?

Without 24/7/365 support, you won’t last very long in the hosting industry. You need to be able to provide support around the clock because all of the top hosting companies do.

If you want to make sure your customers remain happy and they don’t run to the competition, make sure you’re not committing any of the seven deadly sins of providing customer support. It may not be easy to provide incredible support, but if you don’t, you will end up losing customers. Of course, you can always outsource your hosting support to the professionals and get the best possible support, 24/7/365, for your customers.