For 2 weeks now, 24/7 customer support has been in trial operation, including nights, weekends and holidays. We are always available for chat and email. And what about telephone support?
For 2 weeks now our customer support has been working in continuous mode. So we are available for chat and email 24 hours a day – day and night, weekdays, weekends and holidays.
Until now it was unofficial, because we needed to test it properly, to fine-tune the shift changes, to get an overview of the support load during days, nights and weekends, etc.
So there is at least one support staff member available at all times to communicate via chat and email to deal with common queries and problems. In addition, there is at least one technician at the workplace, ensuring the running of servers and solving more technical questions and problems, or this technician is on standby (nights and weekends) and is ready to intervene or help customer support within minutes.
Our support staff never sleeps a wink at night – they are always available.
For the time being, we will still list support on our site Mon-Fri 7am-11pm and Sat-Sun 12pm-8pm, as these are the times we will guarantee support. We prefer to wait for the guarantee of 24-hour support. We don’t want to promise something and then not deliver because of some organizational problem we haven’t worked out yet. So we want to give it more time, but we don’t foresee any complications.
We currently have 4 support staff who rotate in 12-hour shifts and 4 technicians who are on site or on call. hold night and weekend on-call and work from home when necessary.
What you can and cannot expect from customer support
It is also necessary to say what this customer support does and does not offer. You can’t expect a person to be sitting at the chat room all the time who knows absolutely everything – domains, DNS, webhosting, databases, CMS settings, PHP and MySQL programming, VPS, setting up VPS, installing VPS, knows everything about Linux and knows everything about Windows and knows billing and has access to everything and all servers.
Customer support staff (or admins) provide only basic advice and solve basic problems. They don’t have access to servers, they can’t do more complicated technical interventions, solve more complex problems, reinstall VPS etc. That is what technicians are for, and they are handed such requests, but they usually cannot be solved or answered on the spot. This is why support staff will often inform you that they are passing the problem on to the technicians and that they will then get back to you.
Service failures and outages are another matter. In this case, of course, the technicians intervene immediately.
It is also necessary to say what is not part of the customer support – the job description does not include installation of editorial systems on web hosting, programming interventions (fixing problems on web hosting caused by an error in PHP application or configuration), management of virtual or dedicated servers, etc. Support does some of this occasionally, but only in their spare time if there is nothing else to deal with. And that’s why such adjustments and settings are made to customers mainly at night, when customer support is really quiet. During normal working hours, this is complicated and often impossible. We offer administration of virtual and dedicated servers, but only as a paid work of a technician (250 CZK / 15 minutes).
Our goal is to make it unnecessary to contact our customer support at all. That’s why we try to automate everything as much as possible, gradually improving our customer administration interface with new things. The vast majority of things can be “clicked” by customers themselves and do not require support. Many small improvements have been added this week, and more are on the way – we’ll report on everything in more detail next week.
Telephone support vs. chat
We sometimes get questions about how it is that we still don’t have phone support. It’s quite complicated because phone calls are the most demanding on human capacity. We do not yet have the number of properly trained staff to add telephones.
In addition, we believe that questions and problems are much better solved via chat because:
- You can send links, error messages, etc. via chat.
- Only a very limited range of queries and problems can be resolved on the phone, especially general queries about our services. Most problems take some time to resolve, or the problem must be passed on to another member of staff who may not get to it immediately.
- It is not possible to ask for things over the phone for which the customer must be authorized (prove his identity). We consider the correct authorization of the request to be only logging into the customer administration on our website and entering the chat or filling in the contact form. We will not introduce telephone authorisation. If someone asks us for such a thing over the phone, they will still be referred to the chat or form.
- For us it is easier – one employee can handle several chats at the same time, but only one phone call
To implement telephone support, we need to recruit and train at least one additional employee, which will take several weeks or months.