WarrantyDealer.com focuses on providing customized support for small, local ISPs.

by Jeff Goldman [July 30, 2003]

WarrantyDealer.com was founded six years ago to support an OEM manufacturer with warranty and help-desk issues. When the OEM went out of business, WarrantyDealer.com Vice President Lou Braun says, the company refocused on providing outsourced call center services to various manufacturers and retailers.

Once those services were established, offering outsourced ISP support was a logical next step. "You write these support and service contracts, and what happens is you don't get a lot of phone calls," Braun said. "But we can fix computers over the phone, correcting issues that are configuration-related, and that's really all an ISP support house does."

WarrantyDealer.com info@warrantydealer.com

The company's target ISP customer is a smaller provider, as small as 500 customers. "We're not here to take over the world," Braun said. "We want a handful of guys that we can work well with. We want the guy that's out there trying to make a living just like us: He's found himself a little niche in a little geographic area, he's doing okay, and cost control is a big issue."

The company's support team, Braun says, is its greatest asset. "We have talent," he said. "Our guys are very, very knowledgeable about the hardware issues. In some cases, when people put a call center together, they may know the software issues, and they may know the unique issues of that provider, but they don't necessarily know all the hardware support."

Skill and personality
WarrantyDealer.com's call center is based in a 50,000 square foot building shared with a couple of other service providers. When hiring support techs, the focus is on personality as well as skill. "We do look for guys that have their certifications, but we're very much into the way they talk to people—meeting someone we get along with, more than their speed," Braun said.

An individual customer's call history can be made available upon request, and ISPs can access a thorough daily call report. "They'll know how many calls we took today, what the average response time was, what the average wait time was, how long the longest call was, how long the shortest call was, and whether calls were abandoned," Braun said. "It's a pretty inclusive single sheet of paper."

Pricing for the services is extremely flexible. "We'll write a program to whatever needs you have," Braun said. "Most of the guys come on for about $75 a week. Other guys want a call pack, x number of calls a month for a specific amount. There are other guys with 4,000 or 5,000 customers, and we give them a set price: We'd like to say we'll do it for a dollar a customer a month."

Still, each agreement has to be customized to the ISP, since different ISPs can have very different call ratios. "We have some guys that serve very elderly people or retirement communities, so we have to be careful," Braun said. "It really depends on the client. We try to be flexible enough to match their needs. Some guys are a flat fee per customer, some are a flat fee per month, and some guys pay by the call."

For all services, Braun says, the focus is on keeping things very straightforward. "The contract's about two and a half pages long," he said. "It's pretty simple, and we're trying to keep it that way. We're just trying to find that niche and make it work: There are a lot of little guys still doing dialup, and basically owning their community. They've been there for a while, and we're just trying to help them get along."

A smooth transition
One area that Braun plans to explore in the future is the possibility of offering computer service plans to its ISPs' users through cross-marketing of an online store. "We could help ISPs with their customers in getting service contracts at a very favorable rate," he said. "Once we have our store finished, we're going to approach some of the ISPs and see if we can do some cross-promotion."

Bryan Castleberry is the president and co-owner of Internet Gateway, a small ISP based in Austin, Texas which offers dialup and high speed wireless services. The company was founded back in 1996, and Castleberry says the decision was made early on to outsource Internet Gateway's tech support. "It just made sense for us, especially as we were growing," he said.

Internet Gateway had previously been working with a different support company, but when that company announced plans a few months ago to discontinue offering tech support, the ISP switched to WarrantyDealer.com. "We've been really pleased so far," Castleberry said. "The transition went a lot smoother than I thought it would, and his team's doing a fine job for us."

It was the seamlessness of the transition, Castleberry says, that really impressed him. "He just did everything he said he was going to do," he said. "He had everything set up, and the guys were ready to go when we moved our clients over. I don't think our customers even noticed."

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