My Web Host Promised Reliable Service and Technical Support, What Went Wrong?

You would think that, with the countless web hosting providers available, choosing the best would be a snap. Not so. It's hard to know who to trust with your business. After all, you've spent time and money developing a quality website that is sure to please your visitors. A miss-step, like choosing the wrong hosting company, could cost you money and your reputation. But do not fear. There are many good hosting providers. After you calculate the specifics, such as needed bandwidth, disk space allowance and price comparison, you're almost ready to sign with a hosting provider. The last and, maybe the first, key element is who will provide reliable customer service and the much needed technical support to meet your needs?

What is reliable hosting? Well, in a nutshell, a reliable host is a company that offers easily accessible customer service and always accessible technical support. It isn't good enough for a hosting provider to have "customer service" stated on their list of benefits. There are specific criteria that, when met, make for excellent and reliable customer service.

How responsive is their customer service staff?

Reliable customer service is easy to contact and available 24 hours a day. After all, your site is in a market where time stands still. If you're having problems with your site, you've having problems period. The Internet doesn't care if it's 2 am or 2 pm. Even if 24 hour phone support isn't available, there must be other means of contact. Through phone, email and support tickets, a reliable web host provider will offer 24 hours of customer service.

How large is their knowledge base?.

The ability to search through an index of common questions and answers may solve your problem without the need of contacting customer support. This will save you time and get your site working properly in record speed. The addition of an article base is an added bonus. You don't have to find a hosting company that offers a searchable article base, but if they do, it increases confidence that the company continues to provide quality and helpful information to their clients.

Great customer service is a must in your search for a reliable web host. But just as important is reliable technical service. Every hosting company you come across will promise great technical support. But what does this mean?

How easy is it to reach technical support?

Reliable technical support will start with easy access. If the means to reach technical support is somewhat muffled, run away! You will need technical support sooner or later, probably sooner and when you do you're going to want to reach someone A.S.A.P. There should be a toll-free number to contact technical support directly and a means to contact technical support 24 hours a day. The ability to contact "someone" 24 hours a day is not enough. In order to be considered reliable technical support they must be available 24 hours a day.

How do they protect you, the customer?

Does the web host provider continually take care of their own server? If they have technical support to watch out for themselves, they are in turn looking out for you. Because if your web host goes down, everyone goes down. Also look at how often they perform backups. The peace of mind you will have by knowing that your web site is protected and backed-up regularly by your hosting provider is invaluable.

These key elements will help your search for a reliable web hosting company and help alleviate your anxiety about "picking the right one." Along with the above pointers you may want to consider if you need any other support functions. Are you interested in web site management? Are you looking to have a professional design your site for a reasonable fee? If so, wouldn't it be nice to have all your needs met by one company? When one provider offers web site design solutions, reliable customer service and readily available technical support your problems are solved much sooner than if different companies handled each need separately. Remember your needs and you are certain to find a web hosting company that will fit you perfectly.

Flizard Technologies offers web hosting that you can count on. The most affordable web hosting service on the planet that comes with a sitebuilder and many more options.

Technical Support Online

Online Technical Support Schools, colleges, and universities offer courses of study through online sources that allow students to earn their degree at home, studying on their own time at their own pace. Support and interaction between student and professor can be managed completely through online sources. Online Technical Support university and college courses are available twenty-four hours a day. Some Online Technical Support Schools also provide for student interaction with one another through online sources as well, which enhances the learning process.

Students in Online technical support School programs are required to have appropriate software and browsers on their personal computers for receiving courses and submitting assignments. Successful Online Technical Support degree students will have an reasonable level of computer literacy and be able to pace themselves through courses of study. Skills necessary to begin the Online Technical Support degree program will encompass general applications, file management, text processing, data and spreadsheet management, electronic mail system management, graphics, and knowledge of browsers.

Along with other subjects, students in Technical Support universities and colleges should expect to study programming, software applications, networking technologies, operating systems, technical writing, design and management, database management, and information systems design. Technical Support technician study requires some hands-on experience in computer applications.

Well-trained and experienced Technical Support personnel are essential to keeping computer systems running smoothly. Technical Support technicians solve software and hardware problems; set up and maintain websites, networks, and personal computers; write technological and educational materials; and see to keeping the Internet functions running properly.

Technical Support career professionals in call centers and help desks troubleshoot for customers with software and operating system problems. Further studies in Technical Support can provide additional technical and engineering skills that allow success in positions as online bulletin board operators and call center management. These positions generally require a bachelor degree in Information Technology, as well as continually educating oneself to keep abreast of evolving Technical Support issues and developing technologies.

Technical Support jobs are among the fastest growing positions in the field of technology. Appropriate skills almost guarantee a position, and the pay is good.

If you are interested in learning more about Online Technical Support Schools, search our site for more in-depth information and resources.

M. Bustamante is a staff writer for Media Positive Communications, Inc. in association with SchoolsGalore.com. Find Technical Support Online at SchoolsGalore.com; meeting your needs as your educational resource to locate schools

Dealing with Technical Support - 10 Useful Tips

Most people who work in an office environment, buy computer products, or have a computer at home have had the “fun” experience of dealing with technical support. It’s not always the easiest, or most pleasant, experience but hopefully this article will help you make the best of the situation the next time you call. Below you will find a list of things to keep in mind the next time your computer breaks down.

1.Stay calm – Don’t yell at the support person on the other end of the phone. He is there only to help and the more angry you are the less help you are going to get.

2.Get to the point – Ask your question or explain your situation right away. Don't beat around the bush.

3.Don’t be arrogant – You are calling technical support because you need help. Don’t try and be a smart guy.

4.Call for yourself – Don’t call for a friend, relative, or coworker. It’s very difficult, for the person trying to help you, when you are repeating information that you got from someone else.

5.Stay at the computer – Make sure you are at the computer with the problem when you call. It’s hard for someone to help you through a problem if don’t have access to the computer.

6.Record the error – If you are calling about an error you saw, make sure you write it down. It’s hard for someone to help you if all you can say is “There was a box on my screen that had writing in it”.

7.Find out how many people are affected – The priority of your call can be greatly influenced by the amount of people it is affecting. If the problem is affecting a number of people it will probably be escalated to a higher level.

8.Be patient – By default, technical support usually has certain questions they are required to ask. These are not meant to make you angry, they help in the process of solving your problem.

9.Know what kind of support is offered – Ask around the office before calling to see what kind of support is offered. Not all technical support centers offer “How to” help. If your support group does not offer this type of support you may have to get a coworker to help.

10.*The Golden Rule*: Technical support is trying to help - The reason you called, in the first place, is because you needed help with something. Try not to make it difficult for the person on the other end to help you.

These tips aren’t just some random bunch of words I have put together. I am one of the people you get on the phone when you call technical support. I have been working in a Help Desk environment for almost two years and have heard almost every excuse, lie, and problem you can imagine. For me, it makes things much easier if the caller follows these simple rules. Technical support is made up of people too. Try and treat them as you would want to be treated and I guarantee your next experience will be much better.

Dennis d'Entremont is the operator of SaveLoad Video Game Directory and Computers-Made-Easy.com

How to Get Better Technical Support

Whenever you have a technical question that needs answering, you want that answer as fast as possible, right? In the instantaneous world of the internet, patience has become a rare commodity, and the time you spend unable to send or receive email or waiting for your website to come back online can mean lost revenue. If you want to get a timely response from your support technician, there are things you can do as a customer to speed up the process:

 

1. Define the problem as accurately as possible

   The more detail you can provide, the more quickly the technician can identify the source of the problem and correct it. Try to determine the following information if possible:

   • What were you doing when the error occurred?
   • What program were you operating that produced the error?

     Note the version of the program and the operating system that you are running on your computer.

   • If there is a specific error message, what does it say? Be prepared to give this information to the technician by phone, email or fax.
   • What are the steps you take to reproduce the error?
   • What time did you first notice the error?
   • Did the error occur only once, consistently over a period of time, or only when you do a certain thing?
   • Can you reproduce the error on a separate computer?

    

2. Know the priority status of your request

   Support technicians get many requests during the course of the day, often at the same time, with varying levels of urgency, and these requests take time to resolve. If a request cannot be resolved immediately, then it will be assigned an appropriate priority level based on the type of problem to be resolved as soon as possible.

   • Outages - Always top priority. If your website or email is down, any good technician should drop all other projects until this is resolved.
   • breakages - If a critical part of your website becomes inoperable due to a server error, such as a database for a shopping cart, this should always be addressed with high priority.
   • Time Sensitive Operations - If you need something to be done within a certain time frame, such as enabling or disabling a feature of your account, then you should make this clear to the technician. The operation should be performed within the prescribed time frame as long as a higher priority issue does not arise.
   • Ongoing Problems - If a particular problem continues to occur for an extended period of time, its priority should be raised as necessary the longer the problem goes on.
   • Non-Critical Operations - If your request does not adversely affect the function of your services or contain a time-sensitive element, it will receive the lowest priority, but it still should be handled as soon as reasonably possible.
3. Allow an appropriate response time

   As stated previously, most technicians have more than one problem to handle at once, so once you have an idea of the priority level of your request, allow a reasonable amount of time for it to be resolved. Server errors should be resolved within hours to same day, depending on the circumstances. Lower priority items which can be quickly resolved should usually be handled by the next day. If a request will require several hours of work to resolve, expect it to take longer. A technician's job is to be constantly interrupted all day, so such requests will usually be saved until time permits or passed off to another available person to be completed. Understand that any completion time estimate given to you is assuming the absence of any higher priority requests intervening in the process.

   Most types of technical support requests should be answered with an acknowledgement of completion. If you do not receive one or are unable to determine on your own that your issue has been resolved within a reasonable amount of time, then you should contact the technician again to inquire about the status of your request.

    

4. Be a pest if you have to, but be courteous

   If your request is taking an unreasonable amount of time to be resolved, then there is some truth to the old adage that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." If the technician can give you a reasonable explanation for the extended time frame, such as resolving a higher priority issue, then try to give them an appropriate extension to resolve your request. If the explanation for the delay is unsatisfactory and the problem continues to go unresolved, you may need to ask for the assistance of another technician. You should be assertive because you are paying for your services, but do not be abusive. Technicians are human beings too, and not all of them are going to respond well to your unpleasant remarks. If the situation becomes bad enough that you truly believe your anger is warranted, ask to speak with somebody else, describe the unsatisfactory response you received, and request that your issue be handled with the highest priority possible. If this doesn't work, then it's time to consider switching service providers.

    

5. Know the technician's responsibilities

   A support technician at a hosting company is not necessarily responsible for every possible problem you can have on the internet. He is only responsible for resolving problems with the services that his company provides to you. If the company only provides web hosting and domain registration services, then they cannot be held responsible for problems caused by website design flaws, internet connection service outages, email addresses obtained through other providers, or office network problems. Most good technicians are willing to give you a limited amount of assistance with these types of problems anyway, but it should not be expected of them and you should know who else to call if the technician determines that the problem is not within his realm of control.

    

6. Don't be a hypochondriac

   You should learn to help yourself whenever possible, because it's almost always faster than asking somebody else for help. If you are constantly asking for the same password or asking the technician to perform the same task over and over again when you can learn to do it yourself, you are wasting the technician's time and preventing other people from being helped quickly and efficiently. Learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them. If you are always making the same mistakes and asking somebody else to fix them, you will quickly find yourself at the bottom of anybody's priority list. If the technician explains to you how to do something, make sure that the procedure is recorded and stored where you can find it again. It's worth your extra time and his to do this if it saves you both time later on a repetitive task.

Although every case is unique, we believe that by following these guidelines you will consistently receive faster and friendlier assistance on most of your technical support requests.

Stacy Clifford is the founder of ChiliPepperWeb.net and has spent four years assisting customers in understanding how their web services work.

Helpdesk Performance Metrics

As more and more business are making use of helpdesks to interact with customers, both in terms of orders and customer complaints or technical questions, it is apparent that such call centers should have standardized measurements to use in determining level of performance for both the individual customer representative and the entire facility. Some of the common performance measurements which are used to track helpdesk performance are listed below.

Wait time in the queue - This is usually stated in minutes on the average, that the caller is likely to experience in the wait line. Some helpdesk software will inform the caller with statements such as 'the estimated wait time is XX minutes' The caller can then determine whether or not he wants to wait for a helpdesk professional to come on the line.

Average Talk Time - This is the amount of time that the helpdesk professional and the caller spend on the line in conversation. Call center employees are often urged to cut the average talk time to some arbitrary figure. Employees may be disciplined at some level if they are not completing their calls within a specified length of time.

Average Handling Time - The average handling or dealing dime is the talk time plus any wrap-up or hold time.

Service Level - Service level or service level percentage is the percentage of calls answered within a specific time frame. Software often is programmed to see that one particular person doesn't end up taking the majority of the calls while other helpdesk personnel are clocking lower numbers.

Calls per hour - The number of calls or inquiries per hour is agent specific. Again, these are often used as quotas which agent personnel are held to.

After Call Work - Also known as Not Ready Time/NR or sometimes Wrap-Up time, this is the amount of time utilized during which the call center agent processes a customer requests but are not speaking to the customer.

First Call Resolution - This is a measurement of customer satisfaction. It's determined by measuring the number of calls where the customer doesn't call back with the same problem after a certain period.

Total Calls Abandoned - This is sometimes displayed as the percentage of calls abandoned. It usually occurs when a call center is experiencing a high call volume so that there are unduly long hold times and the customer gives up on the call.

Idle time - This is the amount or percentage of time spent by an agent when they are not ready to take the next call. These percentages are usually monitored closely by call center administration.

Each call center will have staff assigned to be part of the quality assurance team. They will look at factors such as First Call Resolution to determine if the customers are being served properly, but they QA team may also listen in on random phone calls, during which the customer representative is being rated on how well the established guidelines are being met.

If you are interested in helpdesk metrics and other ways of measuring helpdesk performance, check Sam Miller new web-site.

Does your Organization Ensure Linkage Between Marketing And Customer Support?

Do you know whether your organization ensures linkage between Marketing and Customer Support? Your customers do. Here's how.

Your customer responds to a banner/email/chat/phone call advertisement. The person they interact with has no idea of the product or service, so the customer does one of the following.

a) Hangs up/disconnects/closes browser
b) Waits patiently
c) Waits impatiently while the customer support agent finds someone who might help
d) Uses Google to find another source for the product or service

If your customer's solution is either "a." or "d." you have missed your window of opportunity to acquire or retain that customer. This results in wasted marketing budget and lower customer satisfaction.

This scenario takes place when Service Centers and the Marketing department don't work together to jointly plan marketing programs. Some companies think they can get an edge on the competition by moving the Service Center to the Marking department, but just making this move doesn't ensure that the customer service team will be ready when the marketing for the latest product or service generates the first customer response.

Each customer marketing initiative requires a significant investment of resources to generate the desired customer response, and each customer touch point is a moment of truth for that initiative. Your company has only a small window of opportunity to successfully deliver the message and convey why it matters to the customer.

Here are some Best Practices Strategies to consider to prevent situations like the one above as well as to integrate your Service and Support Organization to deliver value for your Marketing spend.

1) Design success metrics, measures and customer satisfaction surveys based on methodology, i.e. response rates, conversions, sales and customer acquisition.
2) Jointly plan for the important dates: mail drops, banner ads, TV, print and email blasts to plan staffing and training needs. Include outbound contacts if needed.
3) Plan agent training to include scripting, scenarios, FAQ's, and tools required to successfully complete the transaction.
4) Ensure IVR/VRU has correct messaging and routing set up prior to first call. Test.
5) Include customer service agents in the process for Voice of Customer insight.
6) Establish formal cross-organizational feedback processes between all key stakeholders. Agenda items include performance, recommendations and action items to make the necessary adjustments to ensure program success.
7) Ensure the end-to-end initial marketing through completed transaction process drives brand awareness, recognition and linkage to products and services.
8) Determine whether you will survey customers, and if yes, that you measure overall program success and opportunities for improvement.

Your Service and Support Organization and Marketing departments can deliver your desired program results when they jointly plan programs. These programs are even stronger when they include success measures and intentional plans for service delivery.

Les Hyde has an extensive leadership background in customer service and IT operations with two Fortune 500 companies and the United States Air Force. He holds a B.S. in Information Systems from Park University, an MBA from University of Phoenix, and numerous technical certifications. He is an active board member of the Kansas City Association of Customer Contact Professionals (http://www.associationccp.com/) and also serves as the Vice President of Marketing.

Customer Support Solution - How Would You Ensure The Same To Get The Best Possible Result?

A Customer Support Software is a web based customer support solution that allows robust tackling of Product or Service Support issues through help desk system and raising trouble tickets for issues related to customer priorities. A cost effective customer support solution is highly productive in customer service management.

You need a robust and reliable tool to accept, categorize, and manage customer issues that are widely diverse in nature. A Customer Support Solution is such a dynamic tool that integrates multi channel functioning, multi-user options, unique task assignments, setting alerts and escalation, response through emails, raising trouble ticket for problematic issues, assigning unique service request IDs, follow up and reviewing the status of service requests and completion of the task on time. A matured Customer Support Solution helps in resolving the problem categorized under the unique trouble ticket within a specified timeline under the Service Level Agreement.

This also helps to identify, stratify, and treat an incident or an issue through an all-inclusive and organized 24/7 support mechanism to deliver the best output within a specified time.

You are dealing with issues that are diverse in nature. Each one has different priority levels to the customer. Who do you think is best to solve a specific issue? How would you ensure the same to get the best possible result? Given your priorities and preferences it is almost difficult for you to search for people who have special skills for special issues each time. This is also a waste of time, effort, and resources. Therefore, the best way is to build a team that is best capable of troubleshooting. A Customer Support Solution is just the way to resolve such issues in service management.

For this, just a team of people with diverse knowledgebase is not sufficient. You also need an organized database. Therefore, here is the need for well-organized customer support solution or help desk software that log in issues, forwards these to respective operators and maintain a schedule and list of task and time allocated to these users and generates reports according to your business requirements.

Many customer support solutions have add-on feature to allow:
*Workflow automation
*Integrated advanced features to create customized templates
*Closed loop problem ticketing system to raise, assign and mange issues
*Advanced self-help functions for customers
*Group access to the mail servers
*Real time conversation between the customers and users
*Browsing the existing self-help knowledgebase.

Recommendations:
Some of the highly recommended and top rated Customer Service Solutions are as follows:

Premium Response
NetResults Tracker
ChatStat-Customer-Interaction-System
BridgeCRM
Click-N-Speak

If you need a powerful solution for your support make sure you check out the Premium Response Customer Support Solution for more info.

Providing Excellent Customer Support on a Small Budget

An integral part of any successful e-commerce website is an effective customer support solution. Your online business must be able to quickly respond to inquiries from potential clients and from existing clients, and then be able to address those inquiries accurately and efficiently.

There is no other area of an e-commerce website that is as important as customer service and support. If your online business fails to address this one issue, your business is nearly doomed to failure.

Small business owners usually rely on a simple email address or a contact form on their website to direct inquiries. The reasons for this choice are obvious.

Most small businesses are one person operations. There is seldom any need to provide anything more elaborate provided there is only one person handling all communications.

In the event that the site is being managed by only one person, it is recommended that you provide your customers a simple contact form attached to a simple contact script which can be found for free in numerous places online. A good starting point is: http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/

This is the recommended method because spammers ruthlessly use email harvesting software to gather email addresses from websites for their spam games. If your real contact email address is hidden inside of a CGI script, then the spam harvesters cannot find your address, thus protecting your email address from large amounts of spam email.

Anyone who is operating a website for profit and has no intention of ever expanding his/her business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support.

However, if you find yourself growing to the point of needing something better, then please keep reading.

Small business people often find themselves in the mode of needing to add extra support staff, but still being small enough to not be able to yet afford a customized support software solution.

Software driven help desks can be an expensive proposition. WonderDesk is a decent application to serve this market, but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution.

http://www.wonderdesk.com

Facing costs like this, many small businesses choose to try bringing on extra staff and trying to manage incoming messages through various POP email accounts.

While this method remains the cheapest solution, it is not always the most efficient. Think about this.

If you have email going to Bob and to Steve --- in a theoretical scenario --- and you have Bob handling sales and Steve handling support, all would seem well.

But what if Bob finds himself extremely ill and unable to work? What then? Now you are stuck with the very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Bob can return to work. So the way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access to the accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Bob and Steve to be able to get the email from the POP accounts.

Of course, this introduces a whole brand new problem. Now, both Bob and Steve are getting email from both accounts. But now, if Bob answers an email, Steve really has no way of knowing that Bob has already answered the email. If both Bob and Steve answer the inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely not the image you want to portray of your company. Additionally, you don't want Bob and Steve answering inquiries that have already been answered because it is a waste of human resources.

Facing this problem, it would seem wise to use a web-based email interface. Problem here is that you will have to constantly monitor a web-based email account for new inquiries. Can you imagine the pain of relying on web-based email for the operation of your business? Unless your web mail system contacts you immediately upon the arrival of new email, then you must maintain an open browser window to your web mail account and continually refresh the window to see if there is new email to answer.

Relying upon your web email account for your support inquiries can become very time consuming and inefficient.

The advantages of having the ability to have one email account monitored by a number of people, and having the ability to move some emails to different folders should weigh heavily in your consideration of using web-based email for your sales and support inquiries.

Web-based email had seemed like the perfect solution for the cost-aware business person, but the disadvantage of the troubles of keeping an eye for incoming mail seem to eliminate this as a realistic solution to our problem, doesn't it?

I had argued with myself concerning how to solve this problem for many months. I needed an effective sales and support inquiries system without spending my entire budget to get it. But you know, if you stew over a problem long enough and keep your eye to the horizon, a solution will present itself.

As it turned out, a piece of software I had on my system for quite some time figured into the solution I had been searching for. With the last upgrade of the ePrompter software, I suddenly realized that the final piece of the puzzle was within my reach.

ePrompter is a handy little application that has always permitted us to check multiple email accounts simultaneously and delete messages as we were finished with them. With the last upgrade of ePrompter, the makers enabled us to have the ability to respond to email inquiries also.

With this development, I have handed out copies of the ePrompter to each of my support team members. ePrompter runs in the background and notifies us through an icon in the System Tray how many new messages are present in each of the accounts we monitor. As we answer each email, we either delete it from the server through the ePrompter software, or if we need to store the messages for future reference, we log into the web-based version of the account and move the email in question to the appropriate folders.

To get your copies of the ePrompter software, visit http://www.eprompter.com - this software is free to download and use, and will be absolutely essential to your low-cost (free) sales and support system.

Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com

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