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  1. #1

    How much customer service volume do hosts average?

    Between me and my partner, we have about 25 clients who we currently host. We're not a "public" hosting company. We simply get these deals because we code them sites, and they don't feel like worrying about the site/hosting. Has worked out well so far. Most clients never even drop us an email after the first month or so.

    Partner came up with the idea of taking it "public" in terms of hosting. The thing we were wondering is, how much time we could expect to spend on "customer service" type questions (I'm talking hrs total/day)?

    As it stands, there's a probably a line where we're better off just keeping it how it is, making a little extra $ from hosting those sites. But at the same time, there's also the potential for us to really enter a completely new venture to make money (Plus already have 25 clients). That is, if there isn't too much customer service. What my partner suggests is we take it public, get everything set up, continue coding, and just take it how it comes. We'd reduce our "paid coding" load as the business grows. I like the idea, but I'm worried we'll get inundated with customer service type questions.

    I hope what I'm asking makes sense. Basically, I want to know how much time would you expect to spend per week on 100 customers. I guess this also depends on the hosting offered - let's say we'd do "shared" and/or "vps".

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by mdrr View Post
    Basically, I want to know how much time would you expect to spend per week on 100 customers. I guess this also depends on the hosting offered - let's say we'd do "shared" and/or "vps".
    I would say that you should expect 1 new ticket per day if you have 100 customers. IF your service is decent, the most tickets will be billing related or technical staff that clients are not aware of.
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  3. #3
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    The more phone calls you get the less productive you will be with websites. Some days with 300 clients you will get no calls other days you might spend the whole day on the phone or have a phone Call every time you are just setteling down to your code.

    In our company (600 hosting clients). I manage customers requests for both hosting and programming and forward the programming ones to my coleague. I like programming but no longer have time to do much of it. The amount of time per Customer depends on what service you provide. We have two branches, one that starts at 4$ per month with normal support and another at 20$ per month on which we deal with all sorts of little problems like using teamviewer to configure email accounts. The more expensive accounts take up more time on average and call us more often.

  4. #4
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    It really is a hit or miss depending on how your service is configured. You will find that if everything is 'ready to go' from the purchase and account setup, then most clients will never in their lifespan with the company require to contact you at all. A good knowledgebase helps to reduce overall ticket volume as well.
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by HostWithLove_Cody View Post
    It really is a hit or miss depending on how your service is configured. You will find that if everything is 'ready to go' from the purchase and account setup, then most clients will never in their lifespan with the company require to contact you at all. A good knowledgebase helps to reduce overall ticket volume as well.
    That is not absolutely true. You will always receive tickets such as:
    - billing requests
    - backup restores
    - enabling functionalities requests
    - orders verification - possible fraud orders checking
    - site transfers
    - ip blocking - firewall rules etc
    - domain changes
    - cpanel help
    and more...
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  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dr_Michael View Post
    That is not absolutely true. You will always receive tickets such as:

    - billing requests

    - backup restores

    - enabling functionalities requests

    - orders verification - possible fraud orders checking

    - site transfers

    - ip blocking - firewall rules etc

    - domain changes

    - cpanel help

    and more...

    Billing requests aren't really that common. We have been in operations for over 2 years and in total ticket volume, billing tickets are by far the least we've received. The fact that billing tickets are generally understood to take longer than technical support also helps.

    For the most part, everything else you mentioned can be automated and majority of the decent hosting providers would have these features in place.

    For example, backup restores can be automated with R1Soft if that plugin is already enabled in cPanel.

    IP Unblocking can be automated with the correct plugin and our market research shows a lot of hosting providers offer this feature in their client area.

    Not sure what you mean by enabling functionality, but as mentioned, if everything was already configured to work properly from the get-go then there isn't a need to enable something to begin with. For example the setting up of certain plugins like CloudFlare and PHP Selector, etc? I do see a need to disable functions that can compromise the server though and that really is more important than anything else. We wouldn't enable those functions even if clients requested for them as it is understood to be a vulnerability.

    Domain Changes - you will find that most clients don't request domain changes. We are hosting just over 800 clients and we have at most had one client request a primary domain change per 1-2months? I guess the statistics are too low and random to really show a trend or correlation, but that precisely proves my point.

    I do agree with you that order verification is important as the existing MaxMind framework which most hosting providers use is definitely insufficient, but screening an order definitely is much less time consuming than providing technical support and to half-way discover the issue lies in a major misconfiguration of the server that requires recompiling of the entire web-server for example?

    In short, majority of the points you raised can be automated and most hosting providers already have these in place. It may be true I have considered some of the points as being small tasks such as answering a billing ticket or changing a primary domain, and it most probably is the case since when you are in this line of work you will get numb to it eventually. My point is, a properly configured service infrastructure can definitely reduce workload a lot and anyone in this line of work should expect to at least spend a bit of time on the service, but really it is quite minimal if everything works properly as it should.
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  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by HostWithLove_Cody View Post
    Billing requests aren't really that common. We have been in operations for over 2 years and in total ticket volume, billing tickets are by far the least we've received. The fact that billing tickets are generally understood to take longer than technical support also helps.

    For the most part, everything else you mentioned can be automated and majority of the decent hosting providers would have these features in place.

    For example, backup restores can be automated with R1Soft if that plugin is already enabled in cPanel.

    IP Unblocking can be automated with the correct plugin and our market research shows a lot of hosting providers offer this feature in their client area.

    Not sure what you mean by enabling functionality, but as mentioned, if everything was already configured to work properly from the get-go then there isn't a need to enable something to begin with. For example the setting up of certain plugins like CloudFlare and PHP Selector, etc? I do see a need to disable functions that can compromise the server though and that really is more important than anything else. We wouldn't enable those functions even if clients requested for them as it is understood to be a vulnerability.

    Domain Changes - you will find that most clients don't request domain changes. We are hosting just over 800 clients and we have at most had one client request a primary domain change per 1-2months? I guess the statistics are too low and random to really show a trend or correlation, but that precisely proves my point.

    I do agree with you that order verification is important as the existing MaxMind framework which most hosting providers use is definitely insufficient, but screening an order definitely is much less time consuming than providing technical support and to half-way discover the issue lies in a major misconfiguration of the server that requires recompiling of the entire web-server for example?

    In short, majority of the points you raised can be automated and most hosting providers already have these in place. It may be true I have considered some of the points as being small tasks such as answering a billing ticket or changing a primary domain, and it most probably is the case since when you are in this line of work you will get numb to it eventually. My point is, a properly configured service infrastructure can definitely reduce workload a lot and anyone in this line of work should expect to at least spend a bit of time on the service, but really it is quite minimal if everything works properly as it should.
    So do you mean that you have 800 clients and you have never calculated the average number of tickets per day?

  8. #8
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    Automated or not, you will always receive tickets such as:

    1. "Please transfer my site to your server"
    2. "Please change my billing cycle from monthly to annual"
    3. "I just realised I paid the annual invoice but I don't need my hosting anymore. Can you please refund?"
    4. "I need a dedicated ip."
    5. "I will not be able to pay the invoice before the due date. Please do not suspend my account"
    6. "Is there any custom plan between the plan a and the plan b?"
    7. "Please cancel my automated subscription"
    8. "I cannot access my site from my cell phone"
    9. "I need email pop3 fetch"
    10. "I need a discount"
    11. " I need PDO SQLite driver"
    12. " I am not a fraud why did you block my order?"
    13. "Please enable finfo_open function."
    14. " I cannot remember my cpanel password"
    15. " I get internal server error"
    16. " I can send emails but cannot receive (or the reverse)."
    17. "Please change my primary domain and move the subdomain contents as primary etc"
    18. "My site got hacked, please help"

    and the list goes on. I just tried to recall some of the last month tickets we got.
    Last edited by NetDynamics LLC; 10-19-2014 at 04:53 AM.
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  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by WebMaister View Post
    So do you mean that you have 800 clients and you have never calculated the average number of tickets per day?
    The ticket count on a monthly basis is never consistent. We have lesser tickets this month and this is the reason why I am able to spend some time in this thread to provide some of our experiences for the OP to benefit from it. For the record, we do have our own statistics which is why I can state that Billing tickets are by far the least we have received in comparison to all our other departments. With only slightly more than 800 clients, we are really still a small company, but we were much smaller before and we did experience the same concerns as the OP so I can fully understand his concerns - the point of a forum is to share knowledge so others can benefit from it, isn't it?

    My main emphasis here is that a properly set up service, automated in as many ways as possible, can reduce the amount of time needed. You may view a simple action as saving only a minute of effort each time the ticket is opened, but a collective amount of such actions does add up to a tremendous magnitude of time saved over a year, especially when your client base is increasing consistently. We try not to get too comfortable, and it never is, with our setup because that just leads to stagnation of productivity.

    How difficult is it to monitor the server's mail IP address to ensure that it is not blacklisted, and when it does, someone is looking into it to resolve a issue (that ultimately still requires to be resolved) before a ton of tickets flood the helpdesk requesting for help on emails not being able to send out? Or how difficult is it to automate a scan on the server to pick up malware which are the usual cause of a blacklisting, so those malware are quarantined/removed/investigated before they even start to cause problem and land your server's mail IP onto a blacklist? It is only difficult when hosting providers are unwilling to spend a decent amount of effort/money on their infrastructure.

    And yes, I do and had already agreed in my above post that there are tickets which can never be automated. The question here is, how can you get this number to decrease? Do you want clients to send in a ticket asking why they are facing an internal error because of a server misconfiguration?

    Yes, there are cases where it is due to them using a custom php.ini file for example, when they should be modifying PHP values via .htaccess if say we are using LiteSpeed as the webserver, but again that can be documented clearly and lets not forget that clients are also picking up such knowledge as well. If every ticket was explained clearly to them such as "I have rectified the issue for you. The issue was due to you using php.ini to modify the PHP values rather than .htaccess. We are using LiteSpeed as our webserver, so any PHP values must be changed via .htaccess and this is an example of how you can do it (link to documentation if needed). If you require more information regarding this, please feel free to respond to this ticket so I can assist you further with your understanding on it." , rather than a slipshod answer such as "The problem is now fixed", would they require you to help them on the second count? No they wouldn't. In fact it is this tiny action which creates a better impression for the client and also reduce your workload in the future. I often find it troubling that a company's quality of support is based on the average response time or a guaranteed response time - the truth is when a company is trying to improve those values for the sake of better public impression (lets not delve into fake values for a start), it is often compensated in terms of more slack in a response. In essence, a simple issue requires 3-4 responses to resolve which adds up to perhaps a few hours? Why not get it done in a slightly longer time, but properly done, so it is resolved on the very first response?

    And again, for the second time in this post, there are tickets which can never be automated much as we would like them. Such as account transfers, or simple billing/sales requests. But maybe it is precisely this type of rigid thinking that restricts a business from being streamlined further. Who is to say we cannot document a step by step procedure for existing clients to follow for any particular and common billing tickets for example, so they provide the correct information and when you handle the ticket it can be resolved on the first response? Would you rather having to reply once to request for the correct information, then wait for them to provide the information and having to reply a second time? Just by typing that first message to request more information, you have already wasted some man-minutes and those added up become man-hours or even man-days over a year.

    Honestly, there are a lot of ways which the amount of time spent on support can be reduced and you will find clients prefer it that way as well. To zoom out a little, lets say you need to setup a rDNS or null an IP address but your datacenter does not provide those options, requiring you to submit a ticket for it each time. Not only is your datacenter spending man-hours on resolving those simple issues for you, but you being a customer of the datacenter, are also unhappy that you have to wait up to a few hours to get it resolved. If the datacenter had invested in their service infrastructure in include those options for you, not only are they saving time but you are also happier as a client because you are more independent of their support. Correct me if I am wrong on both counts, but this is exactly how your client feels whenever he has to submit a ticket for a simple issue.

    Again, I am not saying everything can be automated till zero time is spent on the business - that is nigh impossible. What I am saying is, with the correct service infrastructure setup, you can spend the basal amount of time on the business, leaving you more time for other purposes, be it expansion of business or others.
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  10. #10
    I have to agree with Cody here. A good host with proper infrastructure and qualified support will find these particular issues to be the easiest and quickest to resolve.

    Now, browsing through the thread I don't see where OP ditches becoming a Reseller as an option. More and more companies provide end user support to their resellers so they can easily minimize their involvement in the simpler issues and focus on what they excel on. At the end of the day they will still have clients turning directly to them as their business is based on the personal relation with the person but a major weight will be lifted off their shoulders by their host.

    Even if you don't choose this route I doubt that you will spend too much time on customer requests. Again, you have to carefully choose your host and if their server configuration is properly set you should expect very few tickets on that matter. So, until you grow your client base to at least a few hundred people you should be ok on the time spent on Support.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by mdrr View Post
    Partner came up with the idea of taking it "public" in terms of hosting. The thing we were wondering is, how much time we could expect to spend on "customer service" type questions (I'm talking hrs total/day)?.

    I traveled the same road some years ago. Worked as a designer and only hosted those clients. Some years later, decided to host the "general" public.

    Looking at all the ticket examples listed above, there's one key way to keep reduce tickets..........have a proper setup...BUT it also depends on the types of customers.

    With a proper setup, you can end up in a situation where you may never hear from the customers. The majority of customers only need two things....there website up and their email working...which depending on your service, emails could be provided elsewhere, or some will already have another email service and would like to stick with that. As a designer, you look for a solution that WILL work for the sites you build. If you build a certain type of sites, your best to focus on customers that use similar types of sites. If you start hosting every type scripts and possibilities, you will end up with lots tickets since not all server setup work with everything.


    Another thing to take into account, which I've seen a host on here fail at miserably....hosting other's like yourself. For instance, if you start offering reseller hosting, MOST resellers have not a clue as to what they're doing, and will open a ticket, multiple times, every other day. I was a reseller once, so I know how it goes. Most of my tickets were requesting help from any road blocks I ran into. At the time I used HostGator...years ago when they were good and before the buyout was even a thought. With every ticket, they were helpful and explained how they fixed the issue. I learned what I needed to do to not open anymore tickets, thus creating environments for my needs. But imagine if they didn't have a fleet of support staff...my tickets, along with however many others they had would overwhelm them.


    Just like Rado_Ch is saying, make sure whoever is providing service to you is top notch. You have to remember, if your provider falls apart, your customers will see you falling apart since they're your customers...BUT nothing is ever 100% and even the best providers may have a dark moment. COMMUNICATION will let your customers and clients know you care. If you're up for 11 months straight, with an occasional maintenance downtime of a minute or two and one day you end going down for a few hours...with the confidence that you built and with communication.....your customer may stay. Keep your public site separate on a separate network from your customers site.


    I hope my ramblings help out in your decision

  12. #12
    We don't, to be honest, receive that many support tickets--more surprising, the types of tickets we receive are sales/administrative issues rather than hardcore technical support questions (server questions, issues transferring files, etc.), or maybe, we just doing something right. Either way plan on receiving tickets on all sorts of issues and each issue, no matter how urgent, should be treated with the utmost care.

  13. #13
    We don't receive to much tickets because of most of clients solve their problem by our Knowledgebase and forum,blog tutorials.

    If you will spend your time on KB, Tutorials, Forum, Blog Tutorials then you will not need to spend to much time on tickets.
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  14. #14
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    1 ticket per day in CS for 100 clients is a very real world figure. However, it also depends on how stable your servers are. Having a good tech support team or server admin helps a lot with this.
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  15. #15
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    As others have stated, the amount of tickets you receive per day will not be consistent a lot of the time. If you're getting many new customers one day you could receive a load of tickets that day, but then the next you may not get one. Make sure you have a knowledgebase filled with plenty of Q's and A's to avoid getting tickets for basic questions.

  16. #16
    Personally, on my host most things are automated. In events where there is a problem the customers are notified exactly what is causing it and are stressed not to contact support due to it already being fixed.

    Also having a knowledge base helps greatly! You just need to teach your customers to use it.

    On average I get about 5-10 tickets every 3 days

  17. #17
    Guys, I don't come on here that often but I gotta tell you this is one of those threads that keep me coming back. Really appreciate your time and frankness.

  18. #18
    Also would like to iterate the sentiment above. I appreciate the feedback (even though I haven't replied - been busy setting everything up!)

    We've ultimately decided to move ahead with this endeavor and have purchased a WHMCS license, which we've "installed" and as of a couple days ago began setting up a payment gateway (stripe).

    At this point we're just wrapping up a few programming related things for a few clients before we launch. I myself just finished reconstructing an entire MySQL database from scratch using only the existing PHP source code. Long story short, clients DB got wrecked and they didn't have any back-ups.

    Anyway, back on topic. I'm actually surprised at the replies to this thread. Though, thinking about the types of tickets I've opened in the past, all but one was billing related. The only other time I opened one was when my login wasn't correctly set after purchasing a VPS.

    After reading the replies we've decided on the following:

    1) knowledge base WITH pictures
    2) detailed tutorial on installing various services (e.g. nginx, apache2, etc)
    3) tutorials on server security
    4) tutorials on 'server admin' type tasks

    Basically, we're thinking we'll provide all the guides someone needs to do it themselves, and hopefully most people will figure it out. But, we'll be there to help those who can't quite get it.

    Anyway, taking time with this so we get things right and right the first time.

    Unrelated to the OP but CPanel for some reason seems 100x more confusing than just doing everything through shell...

  19. #19
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    Knowledge base, blogs, forums are always good. But the ticket count also depends on what market you are concentrating. Say,

    * If you are selling VPSes, will they be managed or unmanaged? Unmanaged requires minimal technical support.

    * Being a developer, are you targeting any CMS, e-commerce platform users that you are already familiar with?

    If yes, you would need to make sure that your servers meet the per-requisites of that software.

    Unrelated to the OP but CPanel for some reason seems 100x more confusing than just doing everything through shell...
    I personally prefer to work via SSH, but I don't find all end-users comfortable working via backend. cPanel is a great CP and just wondering what is confusing for you.
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  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by whrss View Post
    Knowledge base, blogs, forums are always good. But the ticket count also depends on what market you are concentrating. Say,

    ....

    I personally prefer to work via SSH, but I don't find all end-users comfortable working via backend. cPanel is a great CP and just wondering what is confusing for you.
    Yeah, we're still working out those details.

    And personally I just feel overwhelmed with all of the options. I guess when I do it through shell it's "I know I need X so I'll do XYZ". Configuration? "Oh that's in /X/ and I can read the documentation". Something doesn't work? "Alright, let me try X, then Y,Z to debug". etc.

  21. #21
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    Happens when you become so addicted to BASH...

    But what I normally prefer is:

    Server Administration/Management > SSH

    Hosting space administration > cPanel
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