I am curious what all the resellers here think about this...

What if your host (that provides your reseller account) were to offer outsourced support to your clients? Would you go for it, and if so, at what cost? Per client, per ticket, per reseller account?

Every so often I get inquries from resellers that are paranoid about providing support to their clients. It's really difficult for a reseller to utilize outsourced support such as ActSupport, or BobCares, because the reseller doesn't have root access.

Assume that you're someone who trusts your host, you can view all responses by your host and have no reason to think they would try to "steal" your business.

Greetings:

From time to time we probe our resellers to see if something like this would be of service to them.

We run into three mine fields:

1. Some resellers want to be as private labeled as possible; their customer calling the provider for direct support removes the private labeling in their mind.

2. Since we also sell direct, they view us as indirect competition. While they often sell less than our retail pricing they may view the added value of support of enough difference for their clients to jump ship.

3. We, as a company, justify our lower prices to resellers by the basis of that being less people to support over all. So for us to provide direct support to our resellers, we would have to charge. None of them want to pay extra for the coverage (no matter how low a price).

Take care.

Hello,

From the response that we've gotten from our resellers, it looks like there's a split.

A good majority of them want to handle their own customers 100% - they view us and our account plans as competition. They stay private labeled.

The others are usually (in our experience, anyhow) web developers who also provide hosting as part of their service to their development clients. These are usually the ones that don't care so much about the private labeling. They buy domains through our reseller account, and are generally nice and profitable customer wise. We don't mind responding to support requests from these resold accounts as they're few and far between, and the developers have been in direct contact with the customers to get things setup already.

-David

You guys have taken my question the wrong way. :D When I say outsourced support I mean outsourced support, as in you provide private label support for yoru customers... as in they have a help desk and you login acting as a member of their support team.

Greetings BrandonK:

"When I say outsourced support I mean outsourced support, as in you provide private label support"

That's exactly how I read your question :-)

The response would be the same.

Take care.

There's definently a market there and a % of your clients would jump at the chance. We've been asked this many times, but keep refusing.

I agree with Bob that there is a good chunk of a market there.

What lots of hosts have talked with me about doing in the past is take on an outsourced support plan for themselves, and then also take on at a per client or per server type rate the support for their resellers and just essentially pass on the bill (resell...) the support to their resellers.

hostopia.com they offer "Branded Outsource Technical Support"

We do it. We used to offer it as an add-on, but it's more a one on one arrangement now as the requirements can differ greatly. Most seem to be developers with other full time employment.

Gary

Originally posted by Taylor
I agree with Bob that there is a good chunk of a market there.
I wouldn't say that there is a "good chunk of the market there". There's a market there, although I'm not aware of any percentages etc. But if you can offer it, like Editor does, then it's good value adding, and that means more $$$ in your company's pocket. :)

personally, i would not go for such a thing. I would get the feeling that i wasn't really a reseller handling my own clients but rather a salesman for the hosting company.

I mean for web designers and other services where hosting is an added extra then I can see where it can be a benefit. But for people wanting to run a webhosting business I really would not recommend it. You learn a lot of the trade through support requests from clients, and I would not feel happy someone else handling my technical support.

I prefer to be in touch with my clients. I have no need for a middleman. Im sure many have heard "if you want the job done right, do it yourself". I just have a problem letting someone else handle the most important aspect of my business