People should have always have good expierences with hosting companies, this should not be something uncommon.

Also no to knock *****, but personally coming from them to a new and at least decent host you will find many things different, and a really cool thing called support at the new host.

Good Job New Host

Joe

I cant imagine trying to keep *****s 100,000+ customers happy. It must be one hell of a chore to try and deliver even somewhat personable service to that many people.

-Brendan

Originally posted by bbrader
I cant imagine trying to keep *****s 100,000+ customers happy. It must be one hell of a chore to try and deliver even somewhat personable service to that many people.

-Brendan


Totally not true.

We have about 2000 customers and we have one of the best reputations for support. Honestly, it just isn't really that difficult.

Our technical support staff consists of myself (full-time) and 2 part time technical support guys. It is unacceptable, to me, not to answer all support questions within 8 - 12 hours (most of the time 3 hours is the max anyone should wait).

I am utterly amazed that ***** (or any company) can't keep up with 100,000 customers - considering a small percentage of all customers ever really need support.

Just my two cents! :)

--Tina

Im not excusing bad service, im saying it must be hard to manage 100,000 customers and maintain even close to a personal touch. Managing 2,000 customers is a lot different from managing 50 times that. 2,000 customers can still be managed by 2-3 people, its when you get bigger and have to hire outside help that it becomes exponentially more difficult.

-Brendan

Originally posted by bbrader
Im not excusing bad service, im saying it must be hard to manage 100,000 customers and maintain even close to a personal touch. Managing 2,000 customers is a lot different from managing 50 times that. 2,000 customers can still be managed by 2-3 people, its when you get bigger and have to hire outside help that it becomes exponentially more difficult.

-Brendan


Explain why it would be any different. I don't understand.

--Tina

Ok letme help him explain :)

2000 people can be managed by 2 or 3 people.
100000 gee i dunno.... what if the noc had problems and you have 25000 people calling to see whats up. 50000 support mails to answer? Can you do that in one day? I'm sure people will ask for support daily even if they do not know the path to perl or sendmail.

-Andy

You'll see when you get bigger, but having to hire more outside workers who have no direct tie to the welfare of the company other than their jobs and inevitably care less about the companys future than you do, will do less to keep the customers happy.

-Brendan

Originally posted by Synergy
Ok letme help him explain :)

2000 people can be managed by 2 or 3 people.
100000 gee i dunno.... what if the noc had problems and you have 25000 people calling to see whats up. 50000 support mails to answer? Can you do that in one day? I'm sure people will ask for support daily even if they do not know the path to perl or sendmail.

-Andy


I'm saying that if we can manage 2000 customers, and still have one of the best reputations for support, with 1 full time and 2 part time people, ***** should be able to do it with the number of people they employ.

As we grow, we add more support staff to handle the growth...they should do the same.

1. If the NOC goes down - you send out a mass email explaining the situation and have a recorded message stating the same.

2. The path to perl and/or sendmail should be in an easy to use friendly formatted Searchable FAQ.

Again, providing excellent support just isn't that difficult.
:eek:

--Tina

Originally posted by bbrader
You'll see when you get bigger, but having to hire more outside workers who have no direct tie to the welfare of the company other than their jobs and inevitably care less about the companys future than you do, will do less to keep the customers happy.

-Brendan


Keep your employees happy and they will generally serve you well. Tech support people are generally paid low wages and not treated well. Therein lies the reason why alot of support people couldn't care less about the company they work for.

--Tina

We've provided support for 2000 people and 4000 and 6000 and it gets consierably harder to manage more customers in spite of what you may think now. Almost all of our customers are very happy with the support we provide, but it does get harder to manage. There is always a certain very small percentage of users that will not ever be happy be it due to a technical problem or chemical imbalance :) and that number probably gets up there when you have 100k customers. Say if you've seen 50 people say bad things about ***** which you probably havent, (keeping in mind that unhappy people are signifigantly more vocal than happy people) that theres 2000 people out there for ever one of them that arent complaining.

Im not saying ***** is good, im saying that managing 100000 customers is not easy.

-Brendan

Just curious, how many support people do you employ per 1000 users?

I do see what you mean about the number of unhappy customers going up when you get more customers. That's not really what I meant though. I am talking about support tickets that go unanswered for days.

--Tina

We have 3 full time and 5 part time staff right now... 1.3 people per 1k i guess... hard to calculate exactly because of the way were setup but i would say probably 1 well trained full time person per 2k realistically assuming most of the customers have been around a while.

-Brendan

Just as Brendan said, taking care of 100,000 doesn't compare in anyway to a mere 2000. At 2000 those 2-3 employees probably have a very big stake in the welfare of the company. When it reaches 30-40 employees and supports a massive number of clients do you think those 30 or 40 care if one , two or even 50 clients get upset with them? No, because they don't get a raise when the clients increase or even decrease by a few thousand. They just collect their check and go home at the end of the day. But the company with 2-3 employees probably pulls daily 18hr or 20hr shifts for their own sake to ensure the clients are happy and thus making sure you can pay yourself at the end of the week. Do I think its the way it should be , No ! But its inevitable that when you get to the size ***** is you simply lose the personal touch on things. If there was an outage and 1/4th of the clients complained in some way (phone,email,tickets) thats 25,000 complaints. Now if you had 50 employees thats still 500 responses each if every single person was doing support at the same time. Its impossible to respond to 500 requests minimum per person in a day. Image if half the clients complained and half of the staff was out of the office or not handling support ... I believe size does matter, especially to hosting. And there is clearly a difference between 2000 and 100,000 , a huge difference.

Okay, fair enough. Seems like a good ratio to me.

Can you explain to me what it is, about managing more customers, that is harder? To me, it logically seems that if you directly increase the number of support people per ratio of new customers, it should all work out?

PS: I'm not being a smart-ass either. I am genuinely wanting to understand.

--Tina

Originally posted by Jag
Just as Brendan said, taking care of 100,000 doesn't compare in anyway to a mere 2000. At 2000 those 2-3 employees probably have a very big stake in the welfare of the company. When it reaches 30-40 employees and supports a massive number of clients do you think those 30 or 40 care if one , two or even 50 clients get upset with them? No, because they don't get a raise when the clients increase or even decrease by a few thousand. They just collect their check and go home at the end of the day. But the company with 2-3 employees probably pulls daily 18hr or 20hr shifts for their own sake to ensure the clients are happy and thus making sure you can pay yourself at the end of the week. Do I think its the way it should be , No ! But its inevitable that when you get to the size ***** is you simply lose the personal touch on things. If there was an outage and 1/4th of the clients complained in some way (phone,email,tickets) thats 25,000 complaints. Now if you had 50 employees thats still 500 responses each if every single person was doing support at the same time. Its impossible to respond to 500 requests minimum per person in a day. Image if half the clients complained and half of the staff was out of the office or not handling support ... I believe size does matter, especially to hosting. And there is clearly a difference between 2000 and 100,000 , a huge difference.


Maybe the issue, when you grow that large, is how you treat your technical support staff? Maybe if companies treated their support staff better (profit sharing??) they would get better results. I think too many hosting companies focus on the technical aspect of running their business and not enough in customer service.

--Tina

Originally posted by AffordableHost



Maybe the issue, when you grow that large, is how you treat your technical support staff? Maybe if companies treated their support staff better (profit sharing??) they would get better results. I think too many hosting companies focus on the technical aspect of running their business and not enough in customer service.

--Tina

That is an excellent point ;)

I think it is hard to find good help. Anywhere you go, you'll find some young kid who treats you as if he owned the company. I'm talking about even the grocery store here. I've been extremely impressed with the service by some individuals that I gave them my card and asked them to come in for an interview (past job, not current).

I've also expereinced the other side, a cashier or support rep who I could tell didn't go the extra inch, let alone the extra mile and this left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole company.

The bigger you get, the more people involved, the greater the chance of a break down somewhere. Even tera-byte (whom I've had great experiences with overall) has a couple of people who have no business talking to customers. They might be good at technical issues, but they lack in people skills and to find both can be difficult (so I'm understanding, and generally don't get too bent over much in life anyhow).

Certainly profit sharing is an excellent avenue to explore. As you grow, no matter how much they are paid, support generally has to deal with more work and that can lead to disaster.

A buddy of mine at Concentric got burnt out. Had to handle 200 support emails a day, for a flat pay rate and although she was quite personable, there is only so many times you can answer the question, "How do I get my mail?" - without bashing your head against a wall. :D

Originally posted by Jag
If there was an outage and 1/4th of the clients complained in some way (phone,email,tickets) thats 25,000 complaints.

Jag,

When I see things like this I shudder.

Communication is the key to successful customer service. You could be working like the dickens behind the scenes to make things happen, but if you don't communicate your customers will feel like they are left hanging.

I don't run a hosting company and have been a customer of three. In my real life, I am responsible for the systems and technical support for three sites across the country. At these seats we support over 3000 production seats and three distinct computer rooms. I do it with a staff of 30 and we have excellent customer satisfaction.

What are three key reasons:

1) Expectations. We worked out expectations with our customers. Notice the word is not user. It's customer. After all, we're in the customer service business, not technical support. Expectations included working out SLAs (Service level agreements) that detailed how long it would take to respond to a ticket or call. Along with these SLAs we worked with our customers to let them know that we'd keep them informed of what's happening. Priority 1 issues are updated every 15 mins, pri 2 are 30 minutes and pri 3 are 24 hours. This way our customers know that we're working their issue. We include what is happening in terms people can understand and also offer an ETR.

2) Ownership. Each of the folks in my group understand that they own their positions. They are empowered to make changes that maximize uptime and lead to increased customer satisfaction. This sounds simple, but in use it's incredible. When people feel a sense of ownership in what they do there is pride and growth.

3) Follow-Up. We sample our customers after we have fixed their issue to see if things are going well. We also look at each issue that occurs and run down how to prevent it. I see this point as being extremely useful for hosting companies. Always getting the same questions? Add it to the welcome letter.

Anyway, if ***** is that large they haven't managed it well. It's a shame as their model looks to be one that can attaract people.

Jag,

.... and to answer your question ...

You can do a variety of things if there is an issue:

1) Mass email.
2) Website on another system updated that folks are pointed to.
3) Triage on the support calls. Have a person initially answer and rank their issue.
4) Change your ACD to answer the calls and let people know there is an issue.

Thanks!

I'm saying that if we can manage 2000 customers, and still have one of the best reputations for support, with 1 full time and 2 part time people, ***** should be able to do it with the number of people they employ.

I would say many host have just as good reputation. Believe it or not, it isn't that hard. Just do what you should do as a service provider. Provide quality service and support.

As far as 100,000 vs 2000 customers. Huge difference. All these become bigger and bigger issues with each block of 1000.

1) Training - People come and go. You are always training. We go through a support person each few months.
2) Quality of staff - Lets face it, not every person you hire is quality. Many lie to get hired. Also, you are 1 of the three. It is your business. You can answer the most advanced support question in seconds because you have 1000's of times before. New people can not.
3) Accountability - More support people makes it harder for you to hold them all accountable.
4) Automation - 2000 customers can be managed with most control panels and billing software out now. 100,000 needs special requirements, all of which goes back to training issues.
5) Continuity in regards to support resolutions. - Each person does it their way. You can create company policies, but how can you be sure the same person answers the same e-mail with 500 employees like *****?? 3 it is easy.

Brendan should know about support issues with growth. I remember in November when I first joined this board, you couldn't find a customer who would talk bad about HR. 6000 customers now, and the things I listed above really add up. They still have an outstanding rep for support, but they also get a few negative post. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. Also, when you get hit hard with support calls/e-mails, you sometimes have to do a form of triage. Sometimes it takes a while to get to less important issues. Imagine having 100,000 customers.

You'll see when you get bigger

This is the truth. There is like a culminating point to where it finally hits you. When it does, your business takes on a whole new animal.

One last point. Your hosting company does nothing but basic hosting (no offense - I just mean there is no E-Commerce, dedicated, etc...). Look at what ***** offers. I know you were looking to add Windows to your arsenal. That will increase support issues. It just gets harder with each new piece of the puzzle you add.

Shudder at the 25,000 theoretical complaints or .... ? I agree , communication is the key.

If you're employees don't care enough about the company, them naybe it's time they take a trip to the unemployment office these days. THey'll get to meet lots of folks in the tech industry that miss their employers now, but then again, that would be my perspective.

If you made an average of $15 per customer per month and had 100K, then you'd have 1.5 mil g. income per month.You could get, as bbrader says, 1 FT support person per 1K at $4k per month (or there about) and keep them satifified I believe. (Of course that # varies based on your local econ), but that is $400K per month to support.

Yes, that is a lot to pay for ood support, but you could cut that ratio down if you improved effeciency, and as a company grows bigger, efficiency improves or the company becomes another *****. This is where a good, easily navigated knowledgebase and tech support forum is handy. Many questions could be simple ones like "How do I FTP into my account?", these can be answered by a knowledge base or forum user. THen you would want a newsletter and a news page, so that you could post info about an outage and updates for your users. Now the 25K that would have emailed you about the outage becomes 1K, and a batch email to them would solve it, instead of individual replies.

Also telephone support via a toll free US number, that gives the customers the ability to call in support, should the NOC's router or something of that nature be gone, I would suspect that the batch emails and newsletter won't get out unless an off-network address were provided. THen put a recording such as "As of 10 PM, Sunday, we have been experiencing router failures at the network operation center..." and let people know you are on it.

A company with $1.5 incoming cash flow per month would want to have a financial advisor/book keeper, that would cut down tremendously on management's work.

I assume ***** does all/most of this, just not very efficiently.

I wouldn't know the answers, as I do not deal with 100K customers in hosting, but I do know that more customers = more support/service staff-duh-this isn't the get rich world of the internet, unless you will sacrifice your reputation for $$.

In addendum, you don't have to spend $4K per support person, get a local high school or college student with some unix training or a little background, give him some training and enough $$$ to survivive, and KEEP HIM/HER HAPPY, or you lose him and the invested training efforts. You don't need every support person to be IT professionals, just your lead techs (and more than $4K per month for them or they'll depart for better pay). Your HS students could probably live with $500 per mo (that depends on how much work is done, and I doubt more thant that much worth per month anyway), and a lot of them will be happy to work there (face it, McDonalds-although not a bad starting job, or a job that gives technical background and cool nouns and adjectives to a resume)


Also, in the stock market, you never put your money in one stock/fund/any investment, why put all your customers in one NOC? (Unless you own it).

Customers have individual needs, and providing several types of services to choose from (located at different NOC's) could be a viable solution. For instance, one customer may come looking for the advanced features of cPanel, while another may not know the difference between Post Office Protocol and POP3 is :) and would want much simplified features, which could be done with a different cPanel (or other CP) configuration on another NOC.

If you had 3 or 4 NOC's, then only 1/4 of the 1/4 on the NOC that is out would contact you. Now your investment is diversified.

(I do admit there would be problems with this idea, although I am sure it could be worked out)

At $500 pre month they are not likely to care about what happend and so your back to square one. But the rest makes sense but try telling it to *****.

DOH! I have to admit that after reading down the thread, I replied and didn't notice what the original thread was about. I suppose it is too late to request everyone keep on topic, eh? :D

Is a good discussion, just not appropriately named... hmmm.

Wow, you are nice paying $4k per month. Here, this is a little more than the minimal income by law.
I don't think I could find a person with basic knowledge of webhosting with this rate.

I like the idea about hosting your server in different nocs, but this is only a practical solution if you are not that big.

- domi

Originally posted by Chicken
DOH! I have to admit that after reading down the thread, I replied and didn't notice what the original thread was about. I suppose it is too late to request everyone keep on topic, eh? :D

Is a good discussion, just not appropriately named... hmmm.

I've taken the liberty of splitting off the thread, because I reckon it's a darn good thread. Just that there hasn't been a single mention of HostMatters in the rest of the thread, that's all :D The original post can be found at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17447

Originally posted by BC


I've taken the liberty of splitting off the thread, because I reckon it's a darn good thread. Just that there hasn't been a single mention of HostMatters in the rest of the thread, that's all :D The original post can be found at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17447

Great idea!!!
It has been a usefull thread. Albeit a little unfare to the original poster:rolleyes:

OT: next time someone complains about WHT not good anymore and about old days when WHT was useful I'll direct him to this thread and a few others...

Actually, I think most high school students with skills in this area would work for 500 per month. (Isn't 4-8k per month about the right wage for IT guys?) Then angain, visit the unemployment office in San Jose and I bet you'll find a bunch of guys that will work for 2k, but no loyalty.

At the point of which you realize your customer base is heading toward 100k, I'm sure, assuming that you care about running a good business with a good rep, then you'll consider organizing your support team, hiring more, splitting off NOCs, etc., and at whatever rate necessary to meet the increase of customer base.

At that point I would probably try and run it as a few seperate entities.. like say split up the customers into say 20k chunks which a team of 10-15 people whom work together and communicate with one another could manage pretty easily. Divide up the new customers amongst the smaller teams and allow them to work independantly. It would somewhat limit the overwhelming task of dealing with tons of people at once... you could pretty easily implement that with a good ticket system. I havent really done any research into the effectiveness of this kind of setup but it seems good to me in my head anyways. Its always easier to manage customers better when the communication between the different support personel is good as well as that between support and the customers.

-Brendan

Brendan, what happened to your old login name and icq?

Not sure what ur talking about with the old login name thing, but im on icq now.

-Brendan

Well you only have 41 posts here but I though you used to use the username Brendan and had hundreds of posts. I could be mistaken. Please drop me an icq message 205546

I think splitting it into seperate intities would be a tax nightmare, but I guess you could have one main corporation, then the others be smaller assets of the main company... would take a good CPA.

Also, you loose the BIG image that you worked so hard to get. That could be a downside when trying to promote also. Potential customers will see a smaller company instead of a large one.

I think, if you kept on top of your techs, and do spot checks on their customer replies for "Quality Assurance" it would be best to keep it as one large company.

With that many servers it might be best to split them into different NOCs though. I would say two or 3 NOCs at the most.

As for being harder to manage a larger company... Well, that is going to depend on 2 things. The owner, and your lead tech manager.
If the owner has lost his vision of providing quality, or lacks the drive to demand it from his employees, then quality will suffer.

If your support group manager lacks the same vision,,, there you go.

I have worked for some huge companies, and it isn't really harder to manage things, it is just done differently, and someone at the top has to maintain the companies goals, and keep that in the mind of each empoloyee as they come in, and again in spot checks in each area of the company, as well as in the newsletters to the employees each month.

Thee is more work involved, but if deligated correctly to good help, it should not be harder to manage. But then again,,, good help is sooo hard to find now days.

ok, that's my 2 cents.

Tim L :cool:

They could all run out of the same bank account etc... simply divide up contact with the customers into support teams.

-Brendan

I would assume that you can have separate business units in your main business (not separate entities), it would be sort of like AOL, AOL services are split into different units, I think the only business unit that is actually a separate entity is ICQ and AOL-Netscape, but things like AIM, AOLAnywhere, etc are part of the same AOL entity (or could be). Same idea I assume.

I think companies once they reach that size, tend to compartmentalize responsibilities out of necessity. At 2k 4k or even 6k, you have 3 or 4 people that can do support, administration; basically answer any question related to that site, technically or even having to do with billing. Once you reach 15k customers or so, you have separate departments for everything, billing, customer service, administration, NOC staff, etc. It goes on and on. Then if you have more than one call center or location of staff you get delays in response time due to the enormity of staff and servers. Sometimes hosting doesn't scale well. And ofcourse there are exceptions to the rule.

Originally posted by Voodoo Web
Wow, you are nice paying $4k per month. Here, this is a little more than the minimal income by law.
I don't think I could find a person with basic knowledge of webhosting with this rate.

I like the idea about hosting your server in different nocs, but this is only a practical solution if you are not that big.

- domi

Are you tellin me that the minimum wage in your country is near $25/hr US? If so it must be nice. The minimum wage in the US is a little over $5/hr.

Most tech support people in the Texas are get anywhere from $8 - 16/hr.

I used to work for a large outsourcing company who did contracts with most of the major ISPs and OEMs. Basically, you need about one second tier person for every 10 first tier person. And then A QA person for every 20 of them that can listen or read about 1 of ever 20 emails or calls to weed out the ones that don't care. And then of course you have your actual sys admins who would be considered tier 3.

Now of course those figures are for one shift with 3 shifts per day so to get to that point you would be pretty large but you get the idea. The main thing to concentrate on when you get that big is having great training and QA people.