Phone Support in Hosting, is it Needed?
Most people would like the chance to be able to pick up the phone and either praise or yell at their web host, but these days it it a fading trend? The more web hosts I check out it seems like the phone option is not there or is so hard to find you would give up before finding it.
Honestly, for me as long as the Online support (either via e-mail, a help desk system or both) is great I could live without the ability to dial them up to make the same complaint. Chances are your not going to get a quick fix for your complicated issues over the phone any ways. What will the phone tech representative do? They will put in a ticket for you.
For smaller web hosts who don’t have a lot of funds, having a toll-free number can become rather expensive with little or no payoff in the end. By not having phone support you can also avoid those people (you know who you are) who call in about everything and anything that might be wrong with the web site they have. So which side of the fence do you come down on?
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Telephone support is, in my humble opinion and experience, seriously unproductive for support staff and incredibly frustrating for clients.
Let’s face it, GOOD support engineers aren’t great at customer support. If there’s a problem, they can fix it, but given the environment they work in they can do that best when left alone and free of distraction. Telephones ringing and gnarly customers on the end of said telephones can slow things down dramatically, and the only way to really counter that is to employ a group of 1st line support engineers whose sole purpose is to answer the phone and never get “hands on” with anything other than basic e-mail configuration in support tickets. The problem with this is that when a client calls and can’t speak to a person who can directly and immediately fix their advanced issue, because a ticket must be raised to 2nd line support, they get frustrated. They feel as if the call was a waste of time and money (and rightly so), when they could’ve just submitted a support ticket to begin with.
The other huge disadvantage of telephone support is that it adds additional unnecessary workload to support teams due to the fact it’s an effectively unlogged medium. If you call in, the support engineer has to create a ticket on your behalf, otherwise there’s no record that you ever spoke to someone or what the call was about. This is basically pointless because you could save yourself the phone call and submit the ticket yourself directly!
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the desire for telephone support. It’s good to have someone you can immediately contact in the event of any issues and find out what the heck is going on. Unfortunately many of us are completely unable to take a step back and see how unproductive such a system really is, not to mention costly for the host. When you think about it, what do you REALLY need to call a host for? To complain your website is down? A good host will be aware of that before even the client is. Phoning up to scream and vent your frustration doesn’t help anybody, and that’s really all it comes down to. “I have a problem and I want somebody to complain to directly.”
Just my 2.5 cents