Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Our good, then very bad experience with 24x7hostingsupport.com (aressindia)

[redlight154]

Our company originally started our with one tech, Shikha who was fantastic. Work was done properly and eventually we grew and took out 24/7 support. Unfortunately from this point, the subsequent techs were not as good in their performance, English and duties and these techs were requested to be replaced.

History:

We eventually grew to 8 staff members with their company, with a turn over of staff of 20.

In all we used Aressindia for nearly 2 years.

We have lost about 1000+ clients directly from their actions over this time.

Live chat is not good for 24x7hostingsupport unless the boss of the company is doing it (check their live sales chat - it is great because the boss wants your money). Simply put, they can not 'cut it 'with fluent English speaking clients who demand fast and informative chats. You literally have to wait 2-5 minutes for a response that does not properly address the question asked - We used to receive faxes with copies of the chats and the client stating don't we want their business? Who needs this?

Individual tickets have sometimes gone on for days and pages. If they took the time to reply to the ticket properly and check the account setup of the client, they would fix the issue in 1 reply and 10 more minutes of research. There was no logical thinking from the techs. Even telling them how they should answer a ticket resulted in the procedure not being followed after a few days.

The techs could not follow a written down company reboot procedure which resulted in 5 hours downtime (on multiple occasions I might add). There were also times when server changes had been made by techs resulting the server going offline - The longest outage we had by them was 1 day. Unfortunately, it is a simple truth; they do not care about your servers as much as you would.

Finally their company sabotaged 2 servers once we pulled them up on the bad work and took 4 of 8 techs off our team.

If anyone from aressindia reads this - You will likely know who we are and you will also know the above facts represent the real truth about your operations and everyone else needs to read a real life experience with your company and not a sales pitch like I have seen in all your other posts.

If you are going to use them:

1. Give them common tasks e.g. My email doesn't work. Repetitive work is very hard to 'get wrong', although we were amazed by the number of problems with this.
2. Don't give them full server access. Limit their privileges.
3. Don't use them for live chats.
4. Don't ever use more than 1 tech from this company at 1 time. This way you can ensure you have the tech working for you and not just charging you double. A real example: We rang up and asked for the tech on duty - The operator said he wasn't in today.
5. No real time applications with customers e.g. Live chat
6. Use video conferencing or sorts to make sure you get the same tech, not a replacement (e.g. Shikha moving to another new client's account to impress them and us receiving a sub standard tech who doesn't know our procedures).
7. Have an SLA with then and stick to it. Have penalties for them if they can't follow your company procedures or fine them when they breach the SLA. Money talks at their company.
8. What quality do you honesty expect when you pay $600.00US per month, per tech. We learnt our lesson not to use outsourced support after using Aressindia. Take into account the problems, unhappy customers, cancellations, lies and no face to face contact and you have a recipe for disaster.

[CretaForce]

When you start loosing customers why you don't move to another hosting support company? Also it would be good to hear 24x7hostingsupport's opinion about what happened.

[Ariel74]

Outsourcing your primary point of contact (support, for a hosting company) with your clients to a 3rd party company is a bad idea, IMO.

[nubee]

We have now known 24x7hostingsupport.com for a while. They wont set your support standards on fire but will do a good honest job at most times. They have been around for a while and knowing their conservative management won't come out on the forum to discuss this. But I do believe that the are among the best in the business and your story is therefore difficult to accept at face value.

Whats your domain name and who does your tech support now?

Steve D

[premium20]

Originally Posted by redlight154

In all we used Aressindia for nearly 2 years.

We have lost about 1000+ clients directly from their actions over this time.

Something does not seem right in the above 2 statements. They are contradictory. Frankly speaking, the day I would lose my first client due to outsourced support, I will kill the contract there and then. Not sure what made you stay with the company for 2 years and lose a 1000 clients.

[whatever]

Originally Posted by premium20

Something does not seem right in the above 2 statements. They are contradictory. Frankly speaking, the day I would lose my first client due to outsourced support, I will kill the contract there and then. Not sure what made you stay with the company for 2 years and lose a 1000 clients.

The difference is you do not have (and could never imagine having) 1000 customers. By outsourcing support, some customers are bound to leave and many are bound to stay. When you're with a support company and your business is large, I would imagine it would be expensive and in most cases unfeasible to constantly switch providers.

[premium20]

Very well said. But given the sequence of events, he should have defined a threshold for evaluation of the support partner. And we are not sure what scale of operations does he talk about. So I am not sure if he has a thousand customers or may be much more than that.

Agreed, it is difficult to change support providers for massive operations but rather than blow your drum here it would be better to implement stricter quality control over the outsourced partner, to avoid customer dis-satisfaction. 2 years is a sufficiently long period to judge the quality of support personnel.

On a sidenote, I never impose a limit on my imagination and I think you will agree nobody should !!!

[iThink]

Originally Posted by redlight154

If anyone from aressindia reads this - You will likely know who we are and you will also know the above facts represent the real truth about your operations and everyone else needs to read a real life experience with your company and not a sales pitch like I have seen in all your other posts.

How do we know that you are not a competitor of aressindia out to damage their business? You have just 1 post in your name and that too is to badmouth a company. If you are telling nothing but the truth then why hide?

It is difficult but I believe it is not impossible to switch outsourced support provider given that you lost 1000 customers in 2 years.

2 years is a very long time. You have only yourself to blame that you stayed with bad outsourced support knowing they were doing bad things to your business and were also not providing good enough service to your customers.

Originally Posted by redlight154

There were also times when server changes had been made by techs resulting the server going offline - The longest outage we had by them was 1 day.

What were your 8 staff members doing when one of your servers was down for as long as 1 day? Looks like you don't care for your customers as much as the outsourced support that you are blaming. With 8 staff members (once again assuming that you are telling nothing but the truth) you should not have outsourced the core server management in the first place or may be you were charging your customers too little so you couldn't afford to do even the core server management inhouse or even worse none of your 8 staff members had the required technical expertise to work for a hosting company.

[webstarindia]

Most amazing thing is that redlight154 posted his first and final post on 03-May-2006 and after that he never turned back here or WHT (i guess). Otherwise we should have found more then one post of him.

He was here to damage the image of 24x7hostingsupport. What a looser!!

[DDT]

Yep, I always love what I call the "one post wonders".

In almost every case they come on, post about how "whatever company" really stinks etc. maybe make a follow up post or two and then they are outta here...makes you wonder

On rare occasion it is the opposite: "this (insert host brand new to business) is the best host in the world blah, blah, blah..."

[markjut]

So you lost 1000 clients in 2 years? That must be pretty hard to do, if that happened there must have been other reasons for that to happen.

All I can say, is unless you really have to, don't outsource support