Comments on: Phone support: do you require a web host to provide toll free tech support?

By: Jonas

Jonas — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:20:07 +0000

Hello,

Casted my vote on YES. I think phone support is essential, for me anyways. I sometime have serious problems and I need to talk to someone urgently. Using Live Chat they don’t always pay such high attention however I have found that support by phone is always effective.

All the best,
Jonas

By: David

David — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:08:29 +0000

I’ve built and run customer support center to support 20,000 merchant accounts nationwide as part of my running Global Services for a company. I worked out that on average for our business, a typical call cost our company was $16. Our business required 3 CSRs to provide coverage from 7 AM to 8 PM. I also found that most calls could be handled by less trained technicians, so I retained the services of an outsourced service in Canada to handle the bulk of our calls. Those calls cost us $7 each. Again, that was for our type of business and probably is not applicable to yours.

Knowing how support can become a cost-center sinkhole, I recommend that if you do plan to add phone support that you price it out and offer two plans:

1) pay-per-call service like Microsoft and many others do (Thus keeping hosting prices inexpensive for those of us who like our low-cost hosting.)

2) Increase service costs for those that require phone support.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:50:23 +0000

Phone support would be good. I think before trying to implement phone support though your chat support should be online and you should answer email.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:09:41 +0000

I’m thinking I agree with the idea of chat, although I’m sort of the mind that, should all other things fail and it’s an urgent situation, having a phone call as a last resort is a comforting knowledge.

By: G. A. Harrison

G. A. Harrison — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:13:19 +0000

I’m with Rik. I voted for “Couldn’t Make Up My Mind” only because chat wasn’t an option. Chat has almost all of the “Pros” of phone support plus the additional benefit of a record for all.

I like phone support. Tickets are OK, but usually I need help NOW! That is my problem with email and tickets. While I seldom need tech support, it seems that the bigger my problem, the longer the wait.

By: Rik Weber

Rik Weber — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:42:03 +0000

Another line of support that hasn’t been mentioned is live chat. I use a hosting company who have live chat support almost 24 hours a day – I’ve been with them for over 2 years and haven’t had a problem take longer than an hour to be fixed.

By: jr

jr — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:12:02 +0000

I definitely like phone support, but toll free is usually not needed.
A simple landline number is more than sufficient, as I can call them for free from my mobile…
The problem with the pay to call numbers is that they are extremely expensive to be called from a mobile, and toll-free numbers are often blocked from being called from a mobile.