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entries for 2002/7/19
why hosting support sucks
- To survive, the business must make money.
- To make money, the business must attract and keep customers.
- To attract and keep customers, the business must offer good support.
- To offer good support, the business must employ support personnel.
- To employ support personnel, the business must make money.
It's an infinite loop. Worse, attemps to improve support result in more people liking the business, resulting in more sales, resulting in worse support.
What to do? Some businesses seem to accept crappy support as a given, and get by on conning new customers or lowering prices (increasing the customer-to-support-personnel ratio, and thus degrading service even further)... I chose not to compete on price for just this reason.
Unfortunately... The more my reputation as a good host grows, the more customers I get, and the slower my response time becomes. The steps I've taken to improve have definitely made an impact, but I'm still limited by my time and the money coming in.
Also unfortunately, to hire an employee, I'd have to at least double the size of the customer base - and that's assuming I could find someone willing to work for the same low salary I'm getting.
But I can't double my customer base without better support.
Working harder isn't the answer. I work hard now and yet a 24-48
hour response time has become the norm. Yes, I could sit here and answer email all day every day, and ignore the rest of my life, but that's not sustainable.
There's simply no way I can maintain the level of support I want in my business without a ton of cash... or a change in thinking. And I don't have a ton of cash.
I've got to take myself out of the support loop as much as possible. I've got to make my knowledge base accessible to my customers, and then get my control panel working so that they can control their accounts directly.
I drew out my org chart last night. It's got about 30 roles that
need to be filled in a really good subscription services company. It's basically a blueprint for what my business will look like when it's done. Right now, only six of those roles have reliable systems working for them. Tech support obviously isn't one of them, yet that's where I spend 99% of my time. On the other hand, my marketing role barely gets filled at all.
I guess I'm pretty much back where I was the other day: I need to get this stuff automated as soon as possible. That means taking time away from support. Which means support will get worse for a little while.
Which is what I said before. I guess I'm just repeating myself. I don't like what I'm saying though, and I'm worried about letting my customers down in the short term.
But I guess if it's going to hurt, I might as well make it as quick as possible.