Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Getting Support Staff - How much to pay them...

[inverthosting]

Ok, how much pay do you think sounds good for paying your staff for support, and by what method. (like per hour, per request, ect.) And/Or if you have a host company, what do you do?

[HarryR]

In the UK it's about £12,000 PA ($22,600 USD) for full-time which is little above the minium wage.

Considering a competant person can easily handle 6 or 7 technical support tickets per hour, you would have thought that £1 per issue would be a good figure if you were paying per-ticket.

(Perhaps a downward sliding scale for the number of tickets closed per day, so they do get paid more if they work more, but so it doesn't make a hole in your pocket).

[inverthosting]

I use $$ not £

[HarryR]

Work it out

£1 = $1.88605 USD.

[bithost(NET)]

Hosts pay $10-18/hour for techs. Tier 1's are in the $10-13 range, Tier 2's are in the $14-18 range.

In my experience anyway.

I don't know of a good tech who will take a per-ticket rate. What if they get stuck with a ticket that requires 4 hours' time? Now they've been paid $1.87 for four hours' work... NOT.

Bailey

[xDesign365]

We pay our techs around £7.50 an hour but they are fully trained and have been to college for a number of years, so they handle our servers 24/7 keeps our support times low and the number of requests to a minimum

[MatthewN]

£5/Hour... is that a typo? Thats minimum wage I believe.

Edit: Just as I wrote this I noticed you edited the ticket I was worried when I saw the £5/Hour. LOL.

[oalhajjar]

This is interesting seeing the outsourcing of tech support.

[xDesign365]

Yeah stormhost i wasnt thinking straight

[MTSpace at WHT]

Hi,

It really does depend on a nymber of things. Firstly, the quality. If all you need is people to reply to tickets regarding simple how to FTP, mail, CPanel tickets, chances are you can get away with near minimum wage. If you want people who have a number of years worth of experience, have some kind of certification, are more likely to use real english n grama n stuff den u prolly gotta pay sum more $$$. Tier 3 techs go for quite a bit here in the UK, up to £60-70 thousand a year I've seen advertised for an experienced tech in Windows, usually £15-20 thousand lower in the *nix area.

Then we have the issue of outsourced support. Chances are these people will be getting all their answers form a book, and won't be great with their English skills, but they will cost you probably under £1 an hour from Indian outsourcing companies, so it really depends what you're looking for.

Hope you sort some reasonable rates out, and don't forget about the legal side of employment.

[xDesign365]

Indian outsourcing companies = bad idea, may people hate the fact that the company is based in the UK yet they are transferred to an Indian who can speak English but not very clearly, so you have to repeat things etc. Some people get very frustrated finding them reading straight out of a book/database.
Then again you get some very good Indian support techs who actually get the work done and know what there talking about. But i would never use an Indian company to do my sales/support.

[HarryR]

Originally posted by Stormhosts
£5/Hour... is that a typo? Thats minimum wage I believe.

I am infact paid minimum wage by my employer, simply because there are no other tech jobs in the area. You'd be suprised what people can get away with, I should be earning £30-40k a year

[xDesign365]

HarryR what area are you located? At the moment i think there are serveral jobs going in datacenters in London.

[inverthosting]

....so confused...... *ow* ......

[aqi32]

Then again you get some very good Indian support techs who actually get the work done and know what there talking about.

resellerworkz have staff in india (along with other countries) and although i've noticed sometimes that english isn't their first language that's the only difference i've noticed, never had to repeat or reword things to make my question clearer, quality/level/timeliness of support has been excellent.