The hosting business is full of challenges, complaints, and compliments. SiteGeek analytical team member says, ‘It is most volatile industry, an entrepreneur gets fulfilling experience if prepared to meet issues with a capability and potential.' A lot of knowledge, experience, patience, care, and persistence needed to run a hosting business successfully.
The most significant operation of hosting industry is handling complaints. And it is most critical as customers run different types of online businesses, located in various geographical regions, speak different languages and have varying cultures.
It a hosting business is not able or capable of handling the complaint, then indeed, it is going to die soon. Hence a sincere business entrepreneur thinks first of handling complaints on top-priority.
Different Types of Complaints In Hosting Industry
- Poor Performance: The website opens slow
- Downtime: Website goes off multiple times, i.e., server not robust.
- Delayed Support Response: This is the industry, where immediate response is required. Therefore multiple mediums like Live-chat, Trouble-Ticket system, E-mail, Phone, and social media channels are applied to provide better customer service and experience. Somebody should always be available to give a response on time. Otherwise, the customer is even not able to complain, hence switch to another provider.
- Hosting Plan Doesn't Fit needs and requirement: When a customer needs customization, most of the shared hosting plans fail. The customer starts complaining about poor services and sometimes write negative reviews on 3-rd party reviewing and rating websites. Shared hosting plans are created with ‘one size fit all attitude,' so changes to the plan structures are not natural.
- Poor to ambiguous interface to manage resources
Every customer is vital in hosting industry, as it is a subscription-based business. The customer retention is almost equally important as getting new ones. Hence, each unique complain from a customer is handled with utmost care and caution.
Effective Means of Handling Complaints
- Prompt Response: The utmost priority is to listen and record the customer complain or query. Get the issue understood, analyzed and then prepare the correct resolution or response to the problem. If the time is required to resolve an issue, take it from a customer with full courtesy. Make the customer understand, the exact problem and the time needed to fix it. That is ‘keep the customer satisfied.'
- Give Space and Credibility: The customer with a problem need space and correct attitude. The technical staff needs to be accommodative to gather information from a customer, as that is valuable for them, in helping to resolve the issue. A customer is always right, hence is of critical importance in hosting business.
- Friendly with Professionalism: A frustrated or upset customer sometimes becomes offensive, irrational and rude, but a technical representative must use intelligence to calm the situation and get the hosting complaint recorded. Here, just an understanding of human psychology helps with proper training, and the technical staff takes friendly attitude. If such customer gets satisfied with support services, then for sure he/she would write positive reviews and may bring new customers also. The mouth of a word is the best publicity, which a satisfied customer can bring to a company.
- Make an Apology: ‘Sorry for the inconvenience, we are going to look into an issue.' These magic words bring the healthy communication. The delay or avoid taking something difficult or unpleasant and giving lame excuses are very dangerous for business. If a customer is complaining, it is providing an equal opportunity to a hosting company to correct the services.
- Confine to the Facts: Try to gather as much information in the form of screenshots for files contain error logs, as it helps in better understanding the problem and hence finding the solution. Try to find the situation in which problem arises. Most of the time, when the situation changes, the issues sometimes get automatically fixed. Maybe when appears, maintenance work on servers might be going on.
Customer may outburst with emotions and obscure references. But an intelligent technical support engineer would gather all facts and figures from it and would remain confined to it.
Handling Complaint is an art, with accurate and objective attitude resolutions are done.