I am planning on hiring support technicians in mid april, but I am not sure how much to pay them How much do you guys pay them.

For a fully qualified support technician, you are looking at paying around $19-25 per hour.

:)

PPT = Pay per Solved Ticket :D

$19-$25/hour? where do you live.. In Colorado you're lucky to get that. unless you have a MCSE or Cisco certification and are a server tech... Helpdesk techs make $9-$18 an hour here. some make more, for example Oracle is here...

Thought of contracting out to 3rd party company?

Neofree

We pay $3 per ticket, with each ticket taking an average of 3 minutes or so to resolve. By having such a system in place, your techs can work from home, saving you money on office space.

A question for those who pay per ticket:
How about one ticket which takes 1 minute to resolve and another one which takes half an hour? And won't a tech in a PPT system close the ticket as soon as possible regardless if the customer is happy?

Originally posted by Walter
A question for those who pay per ticket:
How about one ticket which takes 1 minute to resolve and another one which takes half an hour? And won't a tech in a PPT system close the ticket as soon as possible regardless if the customer is happy?

Most tickets will probably only take a minute, and yes there will be the odd ticket which might take up to half an hour (although I haven't seen many that take more than 5-10 minutes). It all averages out.

And if they do close a ticket before the customer is happy/the issue resolved, all tickets are monitored, so I don't think they would want to risk losing their position.

Yes, maybe monitoring is an option, but how many tickets do you have per day? I am concerned a bit how you are able to assure a good support quality with techs who live the word "customer is king".
There are three ways to answer a ticket:

the matter isn't resolved at all
the matter is resolved but with a one liner so there is a chance the customer is confused
the matter is resolved and the tech writes a short explanation

So my concern would be that the $x/ticket tech is in a rush to resolve it and jump to the next ticket.

I think if you do the following, you should not have any problems:

1. Let techs know that they have to be FRIENDLY and SINCERE no matter what, and resolve tickets FULLY with proper explanations that anyone (even a newbie) can understand well
2. Monitor tickets randomly to make sure of this

:)

I'd hate to see all my techs in the support box during the 'busy hours' fighting over tickets and none of my techs in the box in the middle of the night when we may get one or two tickets in 4 hours time. With a per-ticket payout I fear I'd have a few clients left hanging during the slow periods :(

Remember -- One upset client has a much bigger mouth (keyboard) than 500 happy clients and sadly the angry client is more likely to tell "everyone else" they felt the response was rushed before they will tell you :o

Deb, so how does your system work?

Deb, so how does your system work?
Our team is paid a flat rate and the hours assigned accordingly (though most, thankfully, work a lot of OT by choice in an effort to keep everything going while we grow). Each tech is full time with medical, dental, and life benefit options, as well as end-of-year bonuses, etc. This ensures someone is around at all times for all clients. They do work from home the majority of the time and this helps, both FutureQuest and the individual team members, a great deal in many areas.

They are 'working and getting paid whether they spend 1 minute or 3 days with a client issue' and this helps to ensure their willingness to spend the extra time since they are "getting paid anyway".

If I were to pay on a per-ticket type of deal I would fear the techs would shy away from our slower times. I would hate to see even one or two clients email in and have to "wait" for the busy times to get a response; as those would be the first to come to forums such as these and say "I'm still waiting....."

Difficult tickets take longer, and easy tickets are responded to faster but no ticket is waiting because there isn't "enough pay to justify responding when it came in."

Another concern of mine with a pay-per-ticket scale would be the employee that is running a "little short on his/her car payment this month" mocking up tickets just to get extra pay :D

For some it may work... however as one of our techs noted, to be fair it would have to be a support desk that had a constant even flow of tickets to justify it and avoid "fighting over tickets". Even then "rushing out responses" would be a concern.

For us, I prefer paying the techs as much as we can (which imho is never enough) to ensure they'll be there when we're busy as well as when we're slow.

PerlDesk at least allows techs to "Claim Ownership" of a ticket while they are working on it. This prevents any fighting over tickets. :)

All of our techs work in house and are paid hourly, however if you are going to pay via a PPT system here are a few ideas we used ot use. An average ticket may get 2-3 responses from a tech person, say that a ticket is worth $1, each tech person is paid a % of that ticket based on their % of responses, so the techs are motivated to answer as many tickets as thoroughly as possible so they dont need to be responded to again (and they get the full 100%). This works well on high volume ticket systems... like we've sent out 41,928 responses so far this year, so there are plenty of tickets to go around. We also track all IP's that tickets come from which would help cut down on employees faking tickets but you really should be able to trust them anyways. I prefer paying hourly because you can't guarantee a tech a stable job if you are paying them based on the ticket flow, thus they can't count on you for a stable job and in turn you will have higher employee turnover rates which is far more expensive than paying them a bit more.

Our ticket system also keeps track of what tickets are flagged to certain techs, as well as what tickets are currently being worked on by other techs on duty using a cool 'leasing' system so people don't answer the same ticket at the same time.

-Brendan

PerlDesk at least allows techs to "Claim Ownership" of a ticket while they are working on it. This prevents any fighting over tickets. Our support software does the same. It includes the reporting on "who answered more and when" etc as well.

We had a tech a while back that took those reports VERY SERIOUSLY -- The result was that [anon] would lock tickets even during [anon's] lunch hour just to ensure no one touched them while [anon] was away at lunch. I'd hate to see what [anon] would've done if money had been involved....
Just the little "lunch hour" issue caused client's to wait longer than they should have...

Hmm, what if the pay per ticket support technicians were to start causing problems to get more tickets. :eek:

Originally posted by bitserve
Hmm, what if the pay per ticket support technicians were to start causing problems to get more tickets. :eek:

Well, before I hire anyone I would need to trust them first. I am sure most other companies (not just hosting companies) would think the same way.