If any fine host around that could help me just to get a number in my head for more calculation.

How many support tickets should I expect from 500 Cilents day/month?

Depends a lot on your type of customer, how good your online help is, etc etc.

Obviously rubbish online help and resellers would create loads of tickets (say 20/day) but excellent online help and very basic customers would create just a couple/day.

Well, I think it is hard to say. You can get 0 to several hundreds. If your server is virtually problem-free with good uptime with a comprehensive FAQs and easy to use control panel and other administrative stuffs, you could probably get by without any support tickets.

If you get tons of them, probably when something goes wrong which require your attention, either server down, email not working and all those.

But I guess you can expect a few tickets from new clients when they face some problems setting up certain things.

That's what I figure through the ticket numbers I seen from different hosters.

Prepare time to write up a FAQ, and put it before the page to your tech support form, it would reduce some tickets.

Regards

I agree that it's entirely impossible to guess something like that. No doubt it's going to be related to the quality of your service and the clarity of your content.

A good FAQ and a message forum can be indespensable.

Even with a good faq, message board, perfect uptime, etc, it's really impossible to say. Some clients need you to hold their hand with everything they do, some clients will never contact you at all.

...and it depends to which clientele you cater your services to. If you advertise to newbies, and try to get the "new" internet/website client, you'll get more tickets than if you're trying to rope in the experienced crowd.

Just trying to point out that your marketing, advertising, site copy & even your design will have an affect on your long-range support requirements as well.

:D Bailey

If it wasn't for some free hosting we do, the ticket desk would be a very lonely place. I agree; it has a lot to do with your client base.

Write a faq! I can not stress that enough. 95% of our tickets are due to none server issues.

Most tickets are about, how do I get email, setting up a FTP program, why the clients site is not visible 5 seconds after registering it, that type of thing. Write a faq, make sure the link is included in the welcome email, make it prominant on the helpdeak page and your tickets will be fewer.

You will still get some, but if you pay your tech's by the ticket, having a faq is nice.

But to answer your question, it really depends. If your server is a quality server with not too many problems your tickets will be fewer. As well, if you have a lot of clients that are new to the Internet you will have more tickets from them since they are learning as they go.

Support/Sales Tickets I'm in total agreement on the 'support ticket' issues. A good FAQ and solid service will reduce those numbers greatly. These things will also help with sales tickets however, when it comes to sales tickets a great deal will depend on how much you are spending on marketing and who you are targeting.

Regardless how great your service is and how wonderful your info FAQs are you will have: a) those who do not read (support) and b) those who want to make sure you are there (sales).

A huge fact people asking this question tend to forget, when they are deciding how much staff they need, is that it's not always about 'how many' but rather 'when'.

Ten tickets are EASY to answer and only require a short amount of time from one human.

However, that one human cannot easily handle the same ten tickets if you receive:

One ticket at 1am
One ticket at 3am
One ticket at 5am
One ticket at 8am
One ticket at 11pm
One ticket at 3pm
One ticket at 6pm
One ticket at 7pm
One ticket at 9pm
and one Ticket at 1pm

The above is much more complicated to satisfy if you are wanting to promote speedy 24/7/365 support.

It's cheap and easy to get a human to answer 10 emails. It's far more complicated to support the multiple humans you'll require to satisfy a 24/7/365 service desk that promises to respond when the client wants the response (which is usually 5 minutes prior to them sending the email and not 4 hours after they sent it).

Sorry, but if I fall in your situation, I shall wake up at 9:00 a.m. and answer those tickets. If the server has 99% uptime, maybe they are just asking for some technical help or consult about something.