Who'll Answer The Phone At 3 AM?

Members of the ISP-Tech list have different solutions for the problem of how to do after hours tech support—and how much to pay the folks who stay up at night.

[April 24, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in April, EC explained,

"Occasionally, we arrange overnights offsite for tech support or helpdesk when we can't arrange to have someone onsite. We have had troubles determining a fair payment scheme for this. Do you give them an adjusted hourly rate? Do you pay per incident? Any suggestions?"

A number of respondents shared their payment schemes:

[RS recalled] "In the support arena I last worked in, somebody would be on call all week. They received $200 for being available, $25 per call, and $50 more if they had to come into the office. All of the techs were salaried. It was rare to get more than two calls in a week."

[KP added] "The way we handle the '24/7 tech support' here is to have normal office hours: 8 AM to 5 PM CST. We then have an after hours pager number. We are very good at calling people back if they page—unless, of course, it's three in the morning…"

[DW agreed] "We do dialup tech support between 8 AM and 5 PM. We do dedicated 24 hour support through a pager, which is referred to very vaguely in our voicemail message."

Others recommended handing the whole issue off to someone else:

[TB wondered] "I must be missing something here. Are you advertising 24/7 tech support? If so, you should consider outsourcing it."

[MK agreed] "Outsource your tech support. I have a company doing that for me: they do my signups and tech support. They also monitor my system: if I take one of my servers down after doing the 'critical updates,' they call me within two minutes to let me know it's down. I love it."

[SS added] "On my website, I present the fact that I outsource a lot of stuff as a competitive advantage."

DW suggested that it's always better to keep everything in house:

"What's the point of owning an ISP if you don't actually run anything? If you outsource the technical support, the modem pools, and the POPs, what would you say you actually provide? We don't outsource anything here."

—End