Would You Outsource Support?


Why?

:stickout

No, I wouldn't feel comfortable that another company dealt with our clients... and personally I enjoy speaking to / helping our clients... :)

No.

One of the major reasons to support your own customers is to improve your own performance.

If you are simply paying someone else to support your customers, you are not going to continuously improve your processes and grow as a company.

Support your customers.

Get to the root cause of all problems.

Repeat...

-t

Originally posted by thewitt
No.

One of the major reasons to support your own customers is to improve your own performance.


Well, there is a major difference between systems support and luser support. I don't think there's anything wrong with outsourcing "I registered my domain fifteen minutes ago and pointed it at your nameservers, but it doesn't work" or "how do I use FTP?" support.

I would think the answer would depend upon what your business plan is. If you are in th hosting business to provide harware/connectivity with high value, you may want to offload some of the "end user"- "How to I FTP into my new page" onto an outsource support company so that you can concentrate on pursuing your business goal, which is to provide the best hardware/network connectivity you can for the price.

If your business model is instead to be the most "user friendly" hosting company and cheerfully answer even the dumbest questions from end users, then you probably would not want to trust that (the core of your business) to a 3rd party supplier.

If you fall somewhere in between the two, then it is less clear. I personally wouldn't outsorce support, as that is the core of what I do. I don't want to try competing in the low/bandwidth or high-quality connectivity or "massive server" categories, because there is IMHO little to distinguish me from the others. I can give better support to my customers than anybody else though. I certainly will provide good servers and connectivity too, but that is the easiest part of the business, and the most commoditized. Support is something that I can do that no other company can do quite like I can. they may be as competent, or as "good", but they are not me or my staff.

It would depend very greatly on the quality of the outsourced support, if you can outsource your support to a qualified group of people who get the job done quickly and well, there is no problem with it. If you are doing it from the point of view of cutting an expensive corner to increase your bottom line then it can be a problem.

-Brendan