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Ways to Reduce Web Hosting Support Costs
Reducing the amount of support tickets and issues is one of the best ways for a web hosting company to reduce their costs and gain time and resources to spend on sales and marketing. If a small web hosts is spending all of their time and money paying support people or answering trouble tickets themselves there is no time to spend on sales and marketing. Without proper attention to sales and marketing a hosting company is doomed to failure because they will not be able to get new signups, which is the key to offsetting attrition and future growth.
There are some obvious ways to reduce the amount of support tickets like not overselling, but there are two ways that are often overlooked. Verifying every signup and providing quality web hosting support tutorials are 2 excellent ways to reduce the amount of support calls you receive.
By verifying every signup with a phone call a web host can prevent bogus signups and scammers. It only takes a few minutes for each account and it is well worth the trouble. One mailicous signup can cause server load issues that affect all accounts on the server and it can land their server on a host of blacklisted ip sites. This will lead to numerous email issues for your legitimate customers. By preventing these signups you can vastly reduce your chargebacks as well. Most chargebacks come from fraudulent signups. Legitimate signups do not usually cause any of these problems, and one fraudulent signup can cause many headaches.
Once they have eliminated their fraudulent signups and prevented a whole host of issues the next way to further reduce support tickets is to provide complete tutorials for their control panel, setting up DNS’s, and configuring email. Many trouble tickets from legitimate customers are just questions from people who are not experts on web hosting. They want to know how to set their domain nameserver settings or configure their Outlook to receive email. They might have a question about what a sub domain is or how to create a MySQL database. All of these types of tickets can be prevented by providing a set of flash tutorials that show them exactly how to accomplish these routine tasks. DemoWolf.com and DemoDemo.com are 2 leading companies that provide these products. For a couple hundred dollars you can get 3-4 sets of tutorials that will cover all of these issues. Each set usually has 10-15 tutorials. A web hosting company can buy a set for cPanel, Plesk, Helm, or whichever control panel they use. These sets will have a tutorial for each task in the control panel. And then they can buy a set to cover email configuration for the popular mail clients and DNS setups for the major registrars. A couple well chosen sets can prevent many tickets from ever being created. These tutorials can also be branded with their logo, which then makes them look like a large company because they look as if they created them in-house. None of their customers have to know that they were purchased. Flash tutorials are an inexpensive way to reduce common questions and impress customers.
By doing a couple of small things like integrating flash tutorials onto their support page and verifying new signups a small web hosting company can drastically reduce their support cost and improve their bottom line.
About the Author: Rodney Ringler is President of Advantage1 Web Services, Inc., which owns a network of Web Hosting Informational Websites including HostChart.com, ResellerConnection.com, FoundHost.com, ResellerForums.com, and HostingKnowledge.net. Rodney has over 15 years industry experience from programming to internet marketing.
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