I'm wondering how are you all training your support staff?

What kind of materials/training/exercises/exampled do you provide for new staff once they start with you in order to get them ready to work by your standards?

Cheers!
Natasha

Ideally you shouldn't have to train your support staff past just getting them acquainted with all the particular support software your company uses. When we hire support techs, we ensure that they always already have the skillset necessary to provide great technical support services for our clients.

Sorry but I don't see how that's possible. Every single job I've ever had I had to go through training even though I had previously worked in the industry and had experience. You have to train your employees to work by your company standards, protocols and use your systems correctly. That's just to begin with ...

Natasha,

We have custom made manuals ready! I spent quite a lot of time in preparing manuals by taking snap shots and explaining it in easy language.

For example : We use ModernBill + cPanel + WHM

Whenever a new staff joins, we go through a 1 week training. We make the new guy sit with a senior staff and see how does it work. They do check the manuals which is given to them...bythetime the training week finishes we have a casual chat with them to see if they are confident enough or not!

Most of the staff becomes good enough to start from day 3!

Firstly employ someone who has good experience in hosting support and then train him for two weeks so that he is used to your hosting services and products.

Get the new staff to work along with current senior support staff

thats about it

Get experienced staff and train them with your company support policies and methodologies, which is what we do and have to make sure that they follow it perfectly.


As brilliantfusion says, if the staff is fresher get the new staff to work along with the senior staff member.

A staff wiki also proves to be a handy tool. Its something that we've just started doing and are slowly building it up.

A staff wiki also proves to be a handy tool. Its something that we've just started doing and are slowly building it up.
I second that, also a while back I made a bunch of flash quizzes people could take, that seemed to work well as you could see their test results.

Fair enough you want someone with experience and skill in your business but everyone has to start somewhere. If no techs where trained from scratch there would be a huge shortage.

I prefer a mix of experience and inexperience. As long as they know basics and are willing to learn more they are welcome. However we don't allow too many inexperienced staff at one time. My staff are able to benefit from other experienced people working with them.

Cheers!
Matt :)

We too use a manual system. The manuals only purpose to to show our staff how we want them to handle strange situations and how to deal with users.

As said above documentation and training with a Senior member will definitely help in the process of ensuring your new staff follow and get used to your company protocols. Having an internal knowledge base wouldn't be a bad idea either which they can refer to when needed - something similar to the wiki idea. Finally actually "working" will gain some practical experience your staff because regardless of the amount of the documentation and/or resources available there are somethings you can only learn while doing it and experiencing it first hand.

a while back I made a bunch of flash quizzes people could take.
Any chance you still have some of those?

Fair enough you want someone with experience and skill in your business but everyone has to start somewhere. If no techs where trained from scratch there would be a huge shortage.

I prefer a mix of experience and inexperience. As long as they know basics and are willing to learn more they are welcome. However we don't allow too many inexperienced staff at one time. My staff are able to benefit from other experienced people working with them.

Cheers!
Matt :)

So true!

I prefer the ratio of 6:4 [ Well experienced and tech geeks : freshers ]

Here in India once a guy gets some knowledge, he starts planning to start his own Infotech / hosting companies and thats why you will have to keep looking for good employees all the time.

I handpicked some of the "needy" guys who were doing absolutely labourish jobs and trained them for couple of months. I can proudly say that they are with me now for 2 years!