We have been in the webhosting business for a substantial number of years and the number of employees keeps growing and growing. I wanted to a pick your collective brain on a couple of matters we've been thinking about lately regarding helpdesk staff.

What do you think is the best reasonable "support staff"/"customer base size" ratio for a shared hosting business?

Which do you prefer, letting people in your helpdesk specialize in a specific area or do you keep specializing to a minimum and demand the same level of expertise from everyone?

How do you keep people motivated in a helpdesk? As we know helpdesk work can very frustrating. How do you help support staff relax?

What kind of reward system you have for helpdesk staff?

Thank you for your responses.

"support staff"/"customer base size" ratio, I believe it really depends on how you setup your business. We have hosted for thousands domains for customers, but supporting tickets are not much. Most works are done by our sys admin. Customers care techs can be in lower level, working on GUI control panel mostly.

It is impossible to put a finger on the 'perfect ratio'. Instead, I think you should measure whether or not your customer/staff ratio is right in terms of real world performance. Is your current size of team responding (and ultimately resolving) tickets in time? Are you finding your staff are having to rush their work, at the expense of quality?

basically, the ratio depends on the amount of work

1. In an NOC majority of the issues are level 3 and hence required a5 member team (min) to run each shift with an average of 10-15 tickets

2. In Shared hosting setup, the level of tickets are generally 1-2 and hence the usual flow of tickets that an experienced tech can handle in a shift is is 30-60 . There were days when we used to handle 60-100 tickets.

hence the ratio is dependent on the number of tickets and its level. If you need someone to maintain your servers , its better to have someone dedicated free from tickets to do it for you .

We're currently handling ~20 000 websites with 8 people dedicated to helpdesk tickets (both e-mail and phone) and 3 dedicated people as sysadmins + software development guys, sales and management. Some of the helpdesk staff specialize in domains and billing for example and some in more advanced technical issues.

How do you reward your people? Based on the number of tickets handled or something more creative?

Basically we follow a method of verifications of the tickets to maintain the quality in ticket handling in my company

Tickets are marked as one of the following

1. Could be more polite
2. not enough proof
3. Spelling mistakes
4. Adequate resolution
5. Number of tickets a day
and few more

Each mistake is marked with points 1-5 and the tech with least percentage of errors is given a performance bonus in three months after reviewing three month performance.

Customer feedbacks are taken every 6 months to select the popular tech and things like this which could boost the entire morale .

Team outings and parties are organized at definite intervals to allow space for relaxation.

This is a case in a support company like ours where each tech could cater directly to a single client or to shared pool depending on the signup plan. Yours could be differet

Each mistake is marked with points 1-5 and the tech with least percentage of errors is given a performance bonus in three months after reviewing three month performance..
Point System is nice, If our Tech's or Agents get a good comment from the the boss... We just talk about it rev them up get them excited. Remind them they mean heaps to us

Rewards are not necessary but having a supportive team is the key. Just chatting with your tech's, reminding them how much they mean to you. Think about well in our case our techs/agents make the business.

What do you think is the best reasonable "support staff"/"customer base size" ratio for a shared hosting business?
You need to clone yourself. Not just transfer knowledge to your staff, transfer your passion and spirit to your staff, so that part of yourself gets transferred into them. You need to do ONE on ONE training to all your staff. If you do this, the ratio would be 1:1000. If you have 100,000 clients, you need 100 staff. If you have 5,000 clients, you need 5 staff.


Which do you prefer, letting people in your helpdesk specialize in a specific area or do you keep specializing to a minimum and demand the same level of expertise from everyone?
It depends. Billing has to specialize in billing. Reseller support needs to specialize in reseller. But if you're only doing basic shared hosting, all your staff must know how to properly handle ALL KINDS of support case in a shared hosting environment.

How do you keep people motivated in a helpdesk? As we know helpdesk work can very frustrating. How do you help support staff relax?
I managed over 50 staff before I sold my first company. How you motivate people? Simple, show them you really care about their life. They are not employees, they are your friends. Ask them how their life is doing, how's their wife and children doing? What are their passion? If you care for their well being, they will work with passion. You don't need to have a reward system in place.


What kind of reward system you have for helpdesk staff?
Reward them with your care. If you really are about their well being, not just for your own business, they will flourish in their work and eventually you will come up with your own reward system which will work with your culture. For example, if you are in a third world country, you can give full college scholarship for dedicated employee's children who've worked for more than five years. It can't be standardized, depends on the people's in your team.

Good luck with growing your business!

What about your average helpdesk staff wage? The higher the wage, the more competent the staff member no!?

I don't speak from experience though. I only have one remote employee. Our customer to staff ratio is in the thousands. Competent people can handle themselves in almost all Level I/II situations.

The higher the wage, the more competent the staff member no!?



Not necessarily. Because it depends on the country you hire the person from .

If you hire a person from US for say 2000 USD, you could possible find a person with the same competency level as the current one from a country like India . This is true for remote staff only.

However if you are comfortable with an inhouse staff, the competency levels must be defined and the pay must be done according to the periodic evaluation starting from a normalized wage .

Thank you for thinking along with be, I've now come up with some nice ideas thanks to you :)

It is not advisable to restrict them in a specific job scopes only. As you know, some of your clients might inquire more related topics on a hosting / software issues. Just imagine you support staff can only answer 1 out of 4 questions from your clients and have to pass around the same questions for other staffs to reply, it makes the whole process not efficient.
It will be great to offer training for your staff on a regular basis on hosting related issues and topics.

I think it's best your staff don't specialise in one area too much. The more areas they deal with the more interesting it is for them. And the more interest they have in their job, the better they will perform.

It's good to have a reward scheme to encourage staff to perform better. The problem is how to do this. You can't just do it on the number of support tickets dealt with as they may just rush through as many as possilbe. And it will encourage them to mis handle them to the put in another ticket and they deal with more. I like the points idea, and maybe base it on a member of staff's average score and a bigger bonus for a bigger score.

You know you can motivate people without cash incentives too, make them the pride of your business when you talk to them :)

Although I'd suggest getting a few monthly spot prizes on the go for extra good measure!

You only need as much staffing as the ticket volume requires. If your techs are adequately handling all the tickets at a reasonable pace, then you are fine.. if there are delays then you need more staff. there is no 'ratio'. One of our clients has 600 or 700 accounts (all paid) and he was telling me he had a crazy busy month with 27 tickets.