Update:  This post is no longer accurate

This post previously discussed our evaluations of using out sourced support during high growth periods.  We have since expanded significantly since then and utilize our own in house team.  Anyone responding to tickets works exclusively with Hawk Host customers.

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A lot of people see out sourcing in any service field as a big negative and this is especially true with web hosting.  The fact is a large majority of web hosts out source their support in some way whether that be by using a company specializing in web hosting or by hiring people who do not work in their office.  Most users though see the outsourcing of support as only when it’s located in a country such as India for example.  Even with support in India I’ve always thought the issue was never the location but rather the training of the staff.  You read about just as many poor support stories from company’s who’s staff are located right in the company’s office.  I know of a lot of web hosting company’s who’s owners are located in the big oh no countries such as India and they are very knowledgeable.  Most of them are praised for their great support so is the location of the support team really the issue?  Probably not in most cases.

So why am I bringing this up? Well we’ve been actively looking to a solution to our growing support problem where we’re having more an more issues keeping up with the support load.  I have been in talks with numerous companies who specialize in web hosting in one way or another.  All of them are highly recommended and probably provide support for the majority of web hosting company’s people use already.  Some of them then they provide you with an easy way to hire people knowedable in web hosting and others provide solutions by server, number of tickets ect.  Those discussion have finally resulted in us finding a solution to our support problem and we will start implementing this in July.  I’m sure many are wondering but Tony you guys respond in very fast already!  This is true but our growth suggests that it is very soon we will be unable to keep up resulting in either slow replies or lower quality replies.  Our staff all being the equivalent of level 3 support people it always seemed silly to have them answering support equivalent of level 1.

We will start having the company we will be working with assist with the much easier questions we receive on a daily basis.  The questions that require our staff expertise will still be possible around the clock obviously as we use an escalation system.  Overall we believe this will improve support speed as well as quality of all replies due to staff handling tickets more to the level they should be.  At times in the past if we’ve had issues with a server which would mean all ticket replies not even relating to that server might be slowed down.  This should no longer be the case as the people who should be working on issues are handling those issues.  No longer will someone be trying to deal with a problem with a server while also trying to help someone on how to create an email account.

Most company’s in this situation do not even talk about the fact they’re doing.  We’re very confident this will actually improve our services rather than degrade them so I have no issue talking about it.  A lot of our high praise is the fact our servers very rarely go down or become slow and this is because of our expertise on management not support. We already review select tickets on a daily basis for quality control purposes and this will still continue.  If you do run into an issue you’re always welcome to email me personally.  This does not mean any ticket you make cc’ing me on them as I mean if you run into a quality issue with support.  Users have always been welcome to email me on quality issues and some have in the past.

If you’re curious at all about our growth in the last 6 months we’ve doubled our current subscriber base.  The next 6 months going forward we’ll double the current base we’ll have as of July so we are growing at a pretty rapid pace.  We’ve also expanded what Hawk Host Inc. the company does as we’ve provided specialized hosting solutions to company’s or provided our expertise in deployment of their servers or continued maintenance of them.  We also have hopes of expanding the software we use ourselves to other company’s as another revenue stream to help fund us.