I have an ISP and hosting business (since 1994) and I was looking to outsource the hosting support; both phone and email. So I started looking around and could only find TWO companies that offer phone support (please correct me if I've missed one); Bob Cares and Touch Support. I'm unclear if Touch Support though is still taking on new customers that aren't hosted at The Planet - and there seems to be some concern there as far as conflicts of interest etc. Bob Cares looks good but for phone support, a single cpanel server, and a VPS box with 6 customers was going to cost me over $560/month; which would be fine but my customer base is pretty mature and I only get maybe a couple dozen hosting related calls/issues per month and much of that is adding or removing email boxes because they don't know how to work the control panel.

A friend of mine who operates a large dialup ISP (dialup primarily) is looking to close his call centre and outsource. I'm wondering out loud here - would there be a market for North American supported phone/chat/ticket webhosting support and server management? (I'm located near Toronto, Ontario).

I haven't thought much about pricing but I was thinking around a $250-$300 minimum for low volume branded support (such as in my own case) to start with. 24/7, monitoring included, etc.

I can pull together a staff for this as I have a lot of skilled contacts with many years experience in IT/Linux/ISP/hosting but I'm curious to see what kind of demand there would be out there. Maybe there is a reason there are only two support companies that offer phone support?

If there room for another offering in this space?

Thanks,
B1

There's also another in Toronto that offers the services you need called DabSphere / http://www.dabsphere.com/. Check it out ;)

Just talked to SeeksAdmin and they are starting to offer US phone support, so I think we're going to try that route. I'll provide an update and let everyone know how it goes in a month or two.

are SeeksAdmin India based? if so, how bad will be the latency during a call?

They are doing the phone support from New York, and I'm Toronto so latency will only be about 15ms from us to them.

I know my customers would flip out if they had to speak to an Indian over the phone. BobCares is nice because the phones are not answered by Indians, they have an American-based support team. Their phone team is just level 1 though, so they can't do a lot to troubleshoot issues for your customers, which may make them angry.

My customers are way too important to me to let an accent get in the way.

I remember i seem somewhere call-center solution comply to your requirements. And i think they was American based call-center. But you cannot expect they solve your customer problem - only level 1 possible. In most case customer call because site down or not open or for billing question or for pre-sales question. So correct set of typical question/answers can help your outsource call center manage your customers call good enough. As Level 2 outsorce it is possible use any outsource support/admin team (even that they will have sad Indian or Russian accent :))
If i am not wrong i found them when i surf the Internet for virtual office solution so try google "virtual call center" or "phone virtual office" and you might be found them. Cost was about 250-300 USD per month 24x7 so it was look as reasonable.

Bobcares is the leading company here! You will find many threads where people are reviewing their service, I still haven't found a bad review up to this day about them.

I'm using Kayako support suite. It's very very good and its not that expensive, but you might want to look for something else if you definately need Phone support.