A Look Inside DreamHost’s Email-Focused Technical Support
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — When industry experts weighed in at the beginning of January on their predictions for web hosting in 2012, former VP of research at Tier1 Antonio Piraino said that despite what web hosts may think, support is not enough of a differentiator from the competition. With every web host offering 24/7/365 support, and providing flexible options for phone, email and live chat, support may become a homogeneous feature in the web hosting industry.
Of course, support is critical to the success of a web hosting provider. Without adequate support, customers are quick to take their business elsewhere and let the poor service be known on forums and social media outlets like Twitter.
Web hosts aren’t all equal in terms of the level of expertise they can offer customers, the customers to support staff ratio, or the way they deal with outages. In an interview with the WHIR, technical support manager for DreamHost Brian Hill says email support has proved to be the most effective for DreamHost’s customer base, and that transparency is critical to keeping its customers happy.
DreamHost has more than 300,000 customers, and Hill says the support team is at around 60 employees.
“We do primarily email-based support so it allows us to have a much smaller team for the number of customers we have,” Hill says in a phone interview.
DreamHost’s team of 60 support staff is divided into small teams of six or seven people with a support lead in charge. Hill is one of two managers responsible for the support leads, and VP of technical support, Ralph Castro, oversees the whole department.
“By splitting up the teams like that it allows us to keep track of people and make sure that everyone is doing what they should be doing,” he says.
Hill says email support allows support techs to work at their level and choose tickets they are comfortable with handling.
DreamHost still does phone support, but it is secondary, according to Hill. DreamHost’s system is if customers submit a support request it checks the account to see if there are any problems that can be determined, and at the end of the request form there is an option for call-back support. The form lets customers choose a time to get a call-back, and then it is put in DreamHost’s system so that support techs can call customers at the most convenient time for them.
DreamHost also provides live chat, as well as live sales support.
“I feel like DreamHost is a little bit late to the game on live chat but it’s something that we wanted to make sure we were doing right,” Hill says.
“We have trouble making sure it’s always on for customers we turn it on and off. We try to make sure that it’s handled so the customers aren’t waiting. We’d rather have them taken care of right away. We’re trying to ramp that up and it’s proving to be a little bit more difficult,” he says.
Hill says DreamHost offers very specialized support that goes “above and beyond” so support techs are on a call for longer than other support staff might be.
“We consider our support staff as junior admins in other companies so our support staff is pretty technically skilled,” he says. “We are able to handle issues that most other staff at other hosting companies wouldn’t be able to handle necessarily.”
For example, Hill says customers may need help with software installed on an account that is broken, DreamHost support would “take the time to make sure that customer is taken care of even if it’s not something that we would install or maintain for them.”
Usually customers support requests are handled on a first-come-first-serve basis but in the event of an outage tickets are moved around to different queues, he says. If there is an issue repeated in many tickets, they are quarantined to a particular queue where a support lead will take over, and liaison with the administration or NOC administration team to solve the issue.
“If it’s a large scale outage we’ll continue to update them throughout the day. We try to maintain communication with them at all times,” Hill says.
When there is an outage, DreamHost uses its status page as a way to keep customers informed with what’s happening rather than emailing customers with updates.
“Over time we have noticed that the less information we give the more mad people get. If we can try to make sure that we are as verbose as possible that usually helps people feel better about what’s going on,” he says.
“We are pretty prideful in the support that we give at DreamHost. It’s something that we feel makes us different.”
