Customer care is essential for business growth

Hosting customer support has evolved to more than just providing the technical aspects of server maintenance.  Customer support is an essential part of any business, whether you are a small hosting company or a giant as Wal-Mart.  Customers will judge businesses on the degree of customer care and extended knowledge they have.

An example, I worked a support desk for a hosting company awhile back. People neglected to send their user name with the support ticket. This means, I now have to email them and ask for their user name before I can proceed.

This is a waste of both of our time. Instead of having a solution, the customer now needs to send the details of the problem, causing yet another delay. And, it increases the number of emails we need to wait for.

Another one is a customer sending a request for support that says only, "It doesn’t work".

If you send me an email saying "It doesn’t work", I have two options:

2. Ask you to describe the problem. Did you get an error? What did you encounter and what happened? Again, this causes a delay as I need to email the person back and ask this question.

1. List every possible problem that’s ever been encountered, as well as many hypothetical ones, which is time consuming and likely a total waste of my time and yours. I could be spending this time with other customers.

Another common problem is the customers that take a very long time to respond.

I’ve had people send me emails asking for help, replied within an hour or 2, then I’ve LITERALLY have to wait 6 to 12 days for them to respond.

Then, we started the whole process over…I respond relatively fast, only to wait another week or more again. Simple problems like this can be rectified fairly fast only if the customer cooperates.

It’s very hard to provide the necessary support when the customers don’t respond quickly.

One more: If a support suggestion fixes the problem, please reply that it works. One reason is just the curiosity of the support staff, I like the satisfaction that we solved the problem, but another is that I want to know if I should offer others the same bit of advice.

Bad support isn’t always the fault of the seller. Customers can also greatly help their own cause if they’d just spend an extra 60 seconds and include the basic and obvious info the first time them make contact.

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Tags: customer service, customer care, Wal-Mart, hosting customer care, Bad support