Dedicated Teams for Tech Support.

Days & Nights have passed, years passed, the effort of the sleepless nights have come to bear fruit. All those phones ringing, all those advertisements, the hard work in converting sales have now brought us to the grand stage of success. The Coup de Grace has happened!

Your now an owner of a hosting company that hosts 50 plus servers. Through hacks and crashes,through tougher times, you have seen through things,your inhouse techs have handled clients support issues well. But now even they are overwhelmed with the amount of work and they still have a mountain more of mails to work through, calls to attend, irate customers to handle!

What can you do? Hiring more inhouse techs means, having to arrange for space, to setup systems, paychecks, benefits and the list goes on. You need to pay by commission or the hourly rate. They need holidays on important occasions and you cannot ask them to stay back as they have put their heart out for you. Your busy techs who are too busy to even sleep and and at such a time can you ask them to train new techs? You have on one hand a good growth momentum that you do not want to sacrifice, but at the other end your bottleneck is your tech support and customer support which cannot go on handling unlimited issues day in day out.

You visit web hosting support sites like hostingtechs.com webhostingtalk.com etc., and look around for dedicated techs to share the load. You realize outsourced techs mean they work remotely and they seem to be much cheaper than inhouse techs.
"Wow, that's a nice option! But then again how do I trust them? "

But you become very wary and you feel unsure, should I risk my last few year's hardwork into the hands of someone I cannot see, someone I cannot handle directly. "What will I do if they screw up my server?"
"Would they handle my servers with care?"
"Better ask ten times than go astray once. --- Yiddish Proverb"

Solution?

Dedicated techs come in different categories.
1. You will find freelancers. They are usually good, but how do you trust them. It's like investing 100% in stocks while financially planning without any gurantees.It takes a lot of guts to trust someone like that and risk what you have created taking years. Freelancers would sometimes be restricted by his limitations of getting help from others, would need to work twice as harder to balance priorities in his life and would usually not be able to afford the repayment of damages done. But they will be cheap and most are good technically. A person goes to freelancing mostly when either the money seems more attractive or the work place he was in was not able to adjust to his requirements as he became better and he decided to work his way outside the system that restricts.

2. Go to a hosting support company that will assign dedicated techs to you on contract. This is like going to Hertz or Avis for a car rental. You can be sure on the quality, you can be sure that they will be reliable. But more than that you know that they cannot disappear overnight if they have lasted so long in this field. Someone else has trusted their servers to them.You sign SLA (Service Level Agreement) & NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) with companies and you realize they are scalable and when you take their support services, your not receiving the experience and knowledge of one person, but of the collective knowledge involved.

What to Expect?

Expectations vary. Most Hosting companies prefer they get the dedicated techs that are best. Hosting Companies believe their techs are the best.

"When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer."Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer."Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."
At these words Banzan became enlightened. "

But your not satisfied and the hosting support company gives you a trial of the tech. Your impressed and you decide to hire him. For the next tech too, you expect to interview and you feel he is not as good as the first tech. Reason, instead of looking at your requirements, you tend to deviate from your objectives to compare with the first tech and you end up not satisfied.

What is the solution?

You need to try the first dedicated tech you have. Understand if he can get your passion for providing support to your company and if he is capable enough to select the people best suited for your team over there. If he can, half your job is done. He will choose the best people for you. Just like you trust your servers to him which is more critical, you need to be able to trust him for choosing a team of his liking as he would be most dealing with them and can train them to your way of working. When you get two superstars in your team, there always tends to be a little friction that causes one or the other to leave. In the long run, this does not seem feasible.

Secondly, you preferred the company for being responsible to handle your support not the individual tech. Hence your worry should not be to retain the tech though it should be your preference; but instead it should be to ensure that the company is committed to providing to your needs as per the SLA & NDA you signed. The techs working for you can be replaced, either due to their decision to leave or for promotions, but your support requirement never ends there. Just like a builder who wins the contract to construct a bridge is trusted to build a bridge of the required standards or else people could be killed if it breaks, similarly, when you contract out your support services, the individuals involved is not what matters but the reputation and the customer orientation of the company you give your work to.

     All the World's a Stage,
    and all the Men and Women merely Players:
    They have their exits and their entrances;
    And one man in his time plays many parts.
    William Shakespeare
    As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7