Currently I am close to launching our web hosting site. I personally dont trust another company providing my support, after all why should they care if a customer stays with us or not. Plus billing & credits and such are important and thats something I can offer myself. Billing & Sales is simple enough to perform myself and be sure its not the best but beyond the best. However the technical aspect im only 90 out of 100 on and the cost of hiring someone would be high, and finding a partner might be hard. I majored in business & medical and taught myself web design and programming past my high school work with computers. Okay enough there down to the actual question -

* I want to offer the technical support - If I outsource it how will I tie it together so that I can provide support live. I can reboot the servers, setup accounts, ips, all of that. Any suggestions I have never out sourced before. I was looking at touchsupport any reviews as well.

Thanks,
GorillaZ

I heard TouchSupport is pretty good, but I don't have any personal experience with them.

I outsourced to a company awhile ago, but they are no longer around. I did all my own billing, new accounts, but I know of a lot of companies who have their outsourced support team handle everything. Most outsourced companies can handle pretty much everything, tech support, rebooting, billing, etc.

We setup Nagios, its an excellent script you can get to monitor all your servers. It can check all the services for you, and it has a great user interface so you can look at all your servers' status's online.

You could also signup for something like Alertra.com to check and see if something goes down on your server. You would just have it notify your outsourced support team and they should be able to do handle it from there.

They should also be able to run your live chat. You can purchase/lease a support system like Kayako's SupportSuite. That would allow your support team to login, answer trouble tickets, login into the live chat system, etc.

Ok lets get real. You are a 1 man show, you can't handle anything when you are sleeping.

No disrespect meant there, I've been there, I've done that... don't commit to something that is impossible to do, it's just not worth it. I've woken up at 4am due to a phone call from someone who couldnt figure out their control panel. I've gotten text messages in the middle of the night by someone asking "does this support actually work" ... yeah, you get the idea.

Now the question is, how do I delegate my server admin / support tasks when im not here. It's a valiant question. And by the way I was shocked when I saw you wanted to GIVE AWAY root access to your servers and your clients data and the integrity of your entire business... but you dont want to give away your support. One rogue customer service agent can piss off a number of clients who submit tickets before you catch them... but one rogue admin can COMPLETELY ruin your business. Something to think about.

Now that I'm done with the "shock and awe" portion of the show :) I would suggest that you get a reliable company to provide BOTH support and admin when you are not at your computer. (A lot of companies provide this, just search). How you forward tickets to them is up to you. Have it ping you first when you are available (Call this level 1 tech support). If you can't figure it out, forward it to the outsourced company. (Or implement some type of rule to auto-update tickets after 2 hrs). Say "I'm sorry but this issue is very complicated, I'm forwarding the request to our level 2 techs". And forward it to the outsourced company. There is no customer in their right mind that will object to being forward to the next level of tech support. :)

Touch Support are truly amazing, they've never let me down, and saved my *** a countless number of times. Worth EVERY penny

* I want to offer the technical support - If I outsource it how will I tie it together so that I can provide support live. I can reboot the servers, setup accounts, ips, all of that.


You would need to talk this out directly with the provider you are going to hire as the exact procedures would obviously vary.

Most of the providers can cover all your support requirements or only the ones that you want to outsource. You would probably need to set up different queues in your ticketing system and have particular queries redirected to you and others to the outsourced support team.

You should also be able to define how you want the support handled and what policies they should follow. It shouldn't be too much of a problem to set all of that up actually.

Best of luck in finding a suitable provider.

Thanks,
Mobin