| Posted by chrisb, 04-30-2002, 07:53 AM | | With good hardware/software, faq, etc... how many support tickets should you get a day?
for say 50 accts? 100 accts?
Anyone care to share their actual number of clients, and low, average and highest number of support requests per day?
How many of those are simple or 1 question? Any of you limit a support request to 1 question per ticket?
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| Posted by pattox, 04-30-2002, 09:36 AM | | half the ammount of tickets you get by the ammount of clients you have
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| Posted by David_Kiofly, 04-30-2002, 10:27 PM | | You can't really caculate the number of tickets, as it depends on all sorts of situational factors. However, generally I have found two things significantly reduces tickets:
(1) The more information you provide in documentation. (Although many people will ask you anyway)
(2) Automate through control panel software common requests (such as MySQL database setup, password protection setup etc.)
Good luck,
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| Posted by arfarf, 05-02-2002, 01:58 AM | | I talk to a lot of other hosts on a regular basis. It's amazing how different hosts attract a different type of client and as a result get different amounts of support requests. Interestingly, most of our users are new to the business with less experience and what we've found by catering to that crowd is that we have about 3 tickets per 100 clients per day. Other hosts that really sell to power users get 3+ times the tickets we do.
For us, a typical new client sends 2 emails and rarely a phone call in their first month. Once they understand how the email works and how to upload pages they just enjoy updating their site and we seldom hear from them.
In my opinion these clients are golden because it frees us up to develop tools and take the time to answer support requests without getting bogged down. If I were you, I'd target the novice user if you're afraid of an overwhelming amount of trouble tickets.
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| Posted by chrisb, 05-02-2002, 02:18 AM | | Thanks for that advice. I had guessed the opposite, assuming newbies would be more likely to inundate you with support questions.
Do you put a caveat that some hosts use on their site, such as "we do not offer support for scripts, HTML... just server-related issues?"
I would think the above caveat would cut down on support requests, but may be wrong.
Last edited by chrisb; 05-02-2002 at 02:26 AM.
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| Posted by arfarf, 05-02-2002, 02:54 AM | | Please don't use caveats. What a turn off. If you don't know, you can always find out. Trust me, if a client calls many of their answers can be found just by going to google and entering the question and doing 5 minutes of research. What could be better for PR. Just make it clear that if it gets out of hand you'd be happy to continue helping them with their problem but that type of work falls under your consulting fee.
The more you get to talk to your cleints the better. They don't expect you to know everything but they do expect that you might know were to get answers (hint, WebHosting Talk). If you're not getting a lot of calls you can take the time they need. As a result, they won't soon forget your service when a friend asks for a recommendation.
I've given advice on everything from digital photography to business name choices.
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| Posted by Incognito, 05-02-2002, 01:56 PM | | With well documented sites and knowledge base and very strong uptime, the following based on the time the customer has been with me.
Month 1 1.0 tickets per account
Months 2-3 .7 tickets per account
Months 4-6 .5 tickets per account
Over 6 months .3 tickets per account
However, I would warn that this is based on no communication outages, server failures, or dos attacks. I would expect if a host experiences any of those they will get over 1 ticket per account just during that time as almost everyone will send a ticket and many will send multiple tickets. Again, you can control that by having an effective means of communicating with your customer such as an off-site status site.
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| Posted by chrisb, 05-02-2002, 07:31 PM | | Gee, that's seems much lower than I suspected even with 100% uptime. I don't understand how you can post results of customers from 1 to over 6 months though since your sig says "coming soon". What does the "coming soon" mean? I took it to mean you hadn't opened your hosting business yet.
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| Posted by arfarf, 05-03-2002, 08:32 AM | | If you don't know who or what you're getting involved with, then this statement is true. One should always check these things out. While I've never been hosed by a host or a gym, I have had search engines take the money and run.
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| Posted by tazd9t9, 05-03-2002, 03:10 PM | | It depends on the type of client, i have some newbies who ask quite a lot of questions, but i have others who only ask one or two at the start and then i dont hear from them for ages.
We have approx. 30 customers and get about 5-10 emails a week asking for help but most of them are from the same person/people replying to support emails etc
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| Posted by chrisb, 05-03-2002, 03:28 PM | | I didn't expect anyone to post to my sig... lol
Checking a company out definitely helps, but you can do all the checking you want and that's no guarantee. IOW, it's like marriage, you really don't know what you're getting into unto you've tried it awhile.
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| Posted by arfarf, 05-03-2002, 03:41 PM | | I hope this client doesn't read these boards... I just got asked how to transfer programs from an old hard drive to a new one. The point is, if you take the time to answer even these questions which have nothing to do with your business, it's great PR. Although it can get out of hand if you don't manage it properly.
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| Posted by arfarf, 05-03-2002, 03:44 PM | | I bristled at your signature line only because a vast majority of our clients are annual payers. Maybe we're just better at relationships than other hosts so I'll take it as a compliment instead of a slam.
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| Posted by bobcares, 05-06-2002, 04:58 AM | | Hi!
This is one of the toughest questions to answer..
We have over 40 hosting companies that we look after and we cannot figure out any number.
We have one client with one server and give us over 250 tickets per month. He has about 200 domains on that server with cpanel The server never goes down and the all the problems are very standard tech issues...
At the same time we have a client who started hosting in 1997 and has over 40 servers. He has some clients who have not even contacted him in the last few years... Again each server has about 200 clients with cpanel...
One can however predict the average number of tickets for a certain hosting company because you know best about your servers, network and the kind of clients that you attract..
Have a great day
regards
amar
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