Outsourced Support – Pay per Ticket?
Posted by Abdul Vasi on 03 Jun 2009 at 1:02 am | Tagged as: General, Hosting
Outsourced support as we know takes off the extra burden of a hosting company if planned properly. Depending on the Number of clients and servers managed, we have the option of settling for Shared or dedicated Technical team. Shared / Dedicated Team is advisable for the companies who are already running a stable business with a good number of clients.
What do we do for a newly launched hosting company with minimum budget? What about the reseller who just upgraded to a dedicated server?
“Pay per ticket” is the solution for this. The Outsourced team normally logs in your helpdesk and responds to your clients query on your behalf without the client being aware of the outsourced support.
Pay per Ticket
Pay per ticket is perfect for small hosting operations with low number of technical support queries and also for the owners who want to take some time off their routine schedule. You pay for the volume of tickets consumed on your help desk and an estimation of the volume of tickets received is sufficient to get started with 24/7 technical support. As this system is prepaid, it’s always a good idea to purchase extra tickets which allows unused tickets to be carried over the next month.
The plans are normally divided in slabs of tickets and the most common slabs are 50 tickets, 100 tickets, 250 tickets. The larger number of tickets you purchase the cheaper it is per ticket. There usually is a one time setup fees charged in the range of 20-50$.
Pay per ticket is the ideal way of outsourcing support initially until your hosting company grows to certain level. The price per ticket is usually between 2.50$ to 4$ per ticket depending on various Support companies and their expertise.
Generally one issue is counted as a ticket until it is resolved and more than one issue per ticket is counted at two tickets. There will be certain hiccups in the initial stage for a new hosting company owner but those are surely sorted out as time progresses.
Is Pay per ticket the Ideal Solution for a new hosting company?
It depends on the individual needs but ideally it is not a bad solution. There is no major investment involved and the tickets do not expire for 60 days. As it is a prepaid system, we could utilize the tickets in a planned manner with basic issues resolved by the site owner and complicated tickets escalated to the support team. Another thing to note is that pay per ticket solution does not cater to level 3 issues like OS reload, Kernel upgrade, PHP recompilation etc. These type of jobs are charged on hourly basis by most of the support companies.
[...] to the tickets and the outsourced team does it relentlessly. I’ve written earlier explaining “per per ticket” solution which is good for starters but doesn’t include Level 3 administrative [...]