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A Bad Example of Help Desk Support
Posted by: Admin Sbloglive.com (Views: 1073)
Date Posted: 4/30/2007 (mm/dd/yyyy)
Have you ever encountered an online help desk experience with a service provider that's so bad that makes you wonder if the whole internet experience is supposed to make our lives better? Well, I have.
I remember when I first started a few small websites. The very first task I have to accomplish is to find a stable and reliable web host. Believe me, it's easier said than done.
Many web hosting service providers are taking on customers so quickly that they are finding it hard to manage their servers well. That's especially true for companies offering shared hosting services.
As some of these websites obviously require more resources than what a shared plan can provide, problems inevitably occur. To make things worse, web hosting providers tend to oversell in order to keep up with the competition and as a result, customers expectations have risen to an unreasonable state.
For example, one of the web hosting providers that I've contracted offered unlimited bandwidth with a couple of GB diskspace. Customers are supposedly able to host unlimited websites on just one plan. The cost of a shared plan is, believe it or not, less than ten bucks.
I didn't believe that they could sustain that business model and deliver their promises. But I was testing out a few vendors at that time and decided to sign up a reseller plan with them.
For the first couple of months, everything works fine. However, as I started loading more and more mini sites (close to a hundred, with each site having less than 10 static pages), the server started giving problems. Downtime was frequent and the service was tremendously unreliable.
Needless to say, I need an outlet to vent my frustrations. Where else but to turn to the overused help desk support. Their phone number always led to a voice mail system. I later learned from some web hosting forum that the company was run by a 2 man team, brothers I suppose.
Anyway, it became so bad that I had to submit a support ticket almost every day. I didn't like the idea to move close to a hundred sites and kept hoping that they would get their act together and get the servers up. It was just wishful thinking on my part.
The help desk support was so flooded that eventually, they stopped replying to support tickets altogether. Somehow, I couldn't manage to log in to their help desk support to track my tickets. I've told them about it but they still couldn't get it right. Seems like they are getting used to not having stuff work.
In this case, I believe that having the help desk support works against them. Of course, if their servers work properly, they wouldn't be having so much support issues. Still, I believe a well run help desk should help to salvage the situation and retain some customers, while allowing the team to rectify any critical issues at hand.
If there's going to be a shortage of manpower, my recommendation is to offer limited support. All in all, it was a nightmarish experience that I wish I don't have to go through ever again.
Article Source: Sbloglive.com
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