We Need Cheap Overnight Tech Support — continued

LS, who works at an outsourcing company, pitched an outsourced solution:

"My suggestion would be (of course) looking to outsource the tech support. There are several good companies that do this (yes, we are one of them), and can make it very affordable. We have several customers that do their own tech support during the day and we provide only after hours support, and quite a few who started that way and decided we did a good enough job that they could outsource the whole thing to us."

[DD agreed] "For the past five years we have had support from 9 AM until 10 PM seven days a week including holidays. It's never been a problem and we've never had a complaint. About three or four years ago I had one customer ask me what she should do if she had a problem at 3 AM and I advised her to go to bed. I just checked and she is still a customer.

If the boss insists on this, it might be less expensive to outsource the late hours and holidays rather than hire more techs."

[TH said] "Should you hire an overnight guy? Do you plan on expanding? If so, then yes. Or if you feel that you could fill their night with 'other' activities that could be interrupted by a phone call, then yes. If it is just for the ability to advertise that you offer 24 hour support, do you think that will bring in enough income to justify 1.5 more salaries?

I started at this company four years ago in tech support. After college, I graduated to the engineering department. When I started, I was the 7 AM opener for our tech support. After 6 months, our 12,000 subscriber base expanded to about 20,000 and I became one of the first to take overnights in our new 24x7 system. I spent my nights taking two to five calls each night and the rest of the time I rewrote the tech manual (our company's troubleshooting guide). Now, one of my co-workers will be soon the first engineer to take overnights. We have had on-call engineers since we opened but with our 50,000 customers we are becoming a completely 24x7 company."

JY, who also works at an outsourcing company, said:

"I agree with everyone's comments that you really don't need to have coverage for during those hours because the call volume really isn't there to warrant paying someone to sit and surf the Web. And if you don't have non-support work for that person to do like stuffing envelopes, data entry, or sever maintenance, then you would just be paying them to sit around.

We run an outsourced call center and support many ISPs (and other IP based companies) with an aggregate ISP end user base of approximately 100,000 subs that's distributed across North America and we still only have one person working the graveyard shift. We are not a huge contact center. We are currently at 25 seats, getting ready to expand to 40, but based on our projections, it will be a very long time before we will need to add a second body to the graveyard shift.

For example, last night our graveyard shift guy answered ....

0 calls from Midnight to 1 AM
2 calls from 1 AM to 2 AM
5 calls from 2 AM to 3 AM
2 calls from 3 AM to 4 AM
0 calls from 4 AM to 5 AM
0 calls from 5 AM to 6 AM
2 calls from 6 AM to 7 AM

But if the powers-to-be are looking for you to go 24/7, there are alternatives to paying a guy to surf the Web. You could outsource justr you after hours (and holidays, and even overflow as well) and only pay for what you use, or look at self-service support. But if just want to find out if it's economically justifiable to hire people to cover that shift, my answer to that would be no."

[KB recommended] "One solution you may want to consider is having an oncall phone that you let your employees take turns doing on-call work. The idea is simple you give them something along the lines of $100 per week to be on call. This can rotate among employees.

They will take a phone (wireless) and use a service like LinxCom to direct after hours calls. This is an automated answering systrem that can essentially deliver ACD services to the customer, telling them that they are on hold for the next available customer service rep. In the background, a service like Linx would then be calling a list of phone numbers (programmable on the Web) and try to reach the oncall tech. Once it did, the tech would press 1 and it would connect them to the caller. If the call volume is low, $100 is golden as they usually wont have to do anything to get the bucks, and you get 24/7 tech support for essentially $500 per month (after you add in the cost of the phone, the employee, and the Linx service). Much less than hiring the three or four other part time people to cover the extra shifts. And the existing employees get a bonus of sorts. Chances are management will love the idea as it keeps cost down and gives you what you want."

—End

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