Learning Center
Web Hosts
Decent Technical Support
Customer care should always be a major consideration in choosing a web host. Determining whether
technical support is dependable is important, because if anything should go wrong with your website,
who do you turn to for help?
Many hosting companies claim that they have technicians working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year in their operation centers, maintaining mission-critical systems. While this may be true, there will always be unqualified people working in the support call centers. This happens more than 'quite often' as companies may allot so much money to advertising and marketing that technical support becomes secondary in priority, or companies might outsource their support centers as cost-cutting measures.
There are many ways you can put them to the test:
- Call up their support center and ask them a question. It could be anything from basic routines to detail-specific.
- Listen and assess their tone of voice. Do they sound confident? Professional?
- Do they put you on hold often?
- Ask support technicians where they are located.
- If you already have an account with them, or know someone who does, ask the technician to pull information about the account. What preventative measures do they take before releasing account information? How sophisticated is their customer tracking and billing system?
- Ask the technical support staff if they provide any online knowledge base or support center for tutorials and other material. This allows you to check out their support documentation.
- Send them an inquiry via email to see how long it takes to get a reply back. Do they leave you with more questions in reply to you?
- What communication channels do they offer? What are their technical support hours?