Best of the ISP-Lists

Making Work for Idle Hands is Practical

ISP principals discuss methods of making use of those times when tech support staff has nothing specific to do.

[September 8, 2004]

On the ISP-Tech list in September, AR asked:

We're a dial-up ISP and have some days where we get almost no calls during the day for tech-support (busy helping customers the first hour and last hour of the day, the rest is dead). What types of tasks/jobs do you guys usually give to your tech support staff? Other than repairing customers' computers, of course. It just seems like a waste of time to have a couple people sitting at their desks doing nothing but waiting for the phone to ring when it may be hours before the next "call for help".

[JM replied] "That's why small ISPs outsource tech support. If they've got skillz then you have them do script development or other programming tasks, web site development, server maintenance, even billing. Whatever you're comfortable with. If they don't have skills or aren't willing to learn new things then I'll venture you'll have the cleanest bathrooms in town."

[SK suggested] "This is a personal preference of mine, but I used to have my techs call the customers and check in with small batches everyday to see how their access is going. They may not be salesman, but if you can give a customer a referral to a computer repair service, or something else like a good place to buy a computer, the customer or the company usually will reciprocate. Not to mention building a good relationship with the customer for the future. If you trust your techs to do this, it pays off 10 fold in my experience.

You may not be a one stop shop for everything computers, but your customers will be more loyal for the help you provide. Just my $1.50 (.02 adjusted for inflation)."

[TB added] "Well, in our small shop, we use that time to do the books, delete staleaccounts, R&D, marketing ideas, etc. And we don't knock the computerrepairs either. They do provide a steady income."

AR was happy to have some new ideas:

Yeah, my techs definitely aren't salespeople, but I think they could handle calling up a handful of existing customers every week and checking in to see how things are going. As long as customers don't look at that as "spamming" them on the phone to buy more service from us.

[BJ cautioned] "I would probably only call the customers up once per year. Make sure not to call customers up more than once per year to follow up to make sure everything is going smoothly."

[SK agreed] "That's right, don't do it too often, but it is a task that can keep yougoing for a while depending on the customer base. Do take up the repair business and have them repair what they can. It should provide a secondary income when support requests are down, but you have to find out if there is enough time to spend 2 hours on a computer repair during the day. When I used to see downtime with techs, it was 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. If people cannot pick up where they left off a lot, you may run into problems. Anyways, I think everyone here has given good suggestions and hopefully it will help!"

[SR remembered wryly] "At the previous ISP I worked at, we had a neat ticketing system called RT or Request Tracker. It was made by Best Practical Solutions. Great thing was, we tracked all of our stuff via that. Billing, new orders, tech support, internal line stuff, customer communications, etc. It was very solid.

We also documented *every* call, so during our downtime and between other things, we called customers back on 'open tickets' or periodically when the tickets were 'stalled' we called them back. While sometimes it was 6 months later, customers were thrilled we would even be concerned with their small problem. Kept us busy, never was a dull moment."

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