Revamped Support

[gtgeorge]

Starting with HG almost 3 years ago I was very impressed with support for the most part. It was timely and would always get resolved in the end.

I have been having problems with support answers and response time with most tickets as of late though. While I have defended HG many times, I now feel something needs to be done before becoming just another crappy host.

Support tickets should not be taking 3+ hours between responses and what's worse is to be responded to with a question for information contained in the ticket.

Please HG pay attention to what is happening with your support department. Just look at all the complaints coming in to the forum, which is a tiny fraction of the user base. I really would hate having to step forward with a negative review having done business with HG for over 2.5 years.

On the other hand, Thanks to Jay Weissman that I have a positive ticket with HG over the last month or so.

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by gtgeorge

Support tickets should not be taking 3+ hours between responses and what's worse is to be responded to with a question for information contained in the ticket.

Please HG pay attention to what is happening with your support department. Just look at all the complaints coming in to the forum, which is a tiny fraction of the user base. I really would hate having to step forward with a negative review having done business with HG for over 2.5 years.

While it has been my good fortune in the last year and a half to need scarcely any support, I completely agree with George's beautifully expressed post.

I've definitely noticed the reading comprehension point in some of the HG posts in the support forum.

[gtgeorge]

Yes, I have used support very rarely, but have opened a few over the last month or so and most took 3+ hours between replies.

The main problem is that the response's clearly showed they did not read the ticket, but rather glanced at the contents, posted a half **s reply and moved on. I questioned the length of time exceeding 3 hours and was told they had an unusual ticket volume that day. I got the same answer to others that took so long. So this clearly means the unusual ticket load was actually the usual ticket load from my observation.

This last ticket was sad trying to get my clients site studio login working. I first contacted live support thinking this would be easy since they obviously did not update the ip change when we went dedicated earlier this year. Even though I specifically asked this to be handled when we moved and was assured there would be no problem.

After watching the live chat tech visit our hosting site and god knows what else, we were told they could not access the ticket that had the info and also had no access to check anything else! What a waste of about 30 minutes.

Then the support ticket comes back and asks, "What is the current username and password?" hmmm my response was to please read the ticket. Anyway over 4 hours later they have access again Time to install a site building program on our site.

[rfay]

This is the only really serious problem with hostgator, but it's a huge one. You don't usually need support, but when you do, they don't actually read (or is it understand?) your ticket. Often it seems they don't understand the technology. And too often, I've gotten a first, and second, and perhaps a third response that seemed actually just aimed to keep me in the "responded to" queue, not to actually solve my problem. Several times I've provided a test case in my ticket, and a test user or test URL, but generally that doesn't get tried.

Very serious problems for a good organization. Please, please keep working to address these problems.

[Pazeh]

I totally do agree.

I'm with hostgator for about 2 yrs now & the time the support does take to respond is way slower then what it used to be six months ago.

I have made posts here about the support's reply time which used to measure in minutes, lately they are in the range of 1 - 3 hrs.

Not that things are bad. I still do recommend, without any doubt, hostgator over any other host that I previously had. But as george said, its good to have a look on whats going on in that department.

I do understand that the number of clients is getting up & hence the support tickets, but I do remember reading the blog about recruiting a large number of employees which must set the support tickets vs supporters balance back.

I would like to mention that the supporters do leave an impression that they "do not read the ticket completely" (there was a thread about this lately too) & the answers that they do leave is not complete and do keep the client (specially the newbies) in a uncertain situation.

Peace
Me

[Pazeh]

one more thing I would like to add, why when I do reply to my support ticket it will que back to the bottom of the support list??

I mean what if I opened a ticket and I did found another problem & I want to inform HG of that too, why I should wait another 2 hrs?? a reply to a current ticket is a "continuation of the problem not a new problem!! Its not logical (at least for me)!!

With this algorithm on, if I ever do need to send any additional info about a ticket I had, I would surely open a new ticket and NOT reply to the first one, cause that will cue my first ticket to the bottom of the list. which will make supporters' job harder to look back in different ticket #s!

Does anyone find HG's approach logical? (maybe there is something I'm not seeing)

Peace again

[gwyneth]

To me, the fact that of the posters so far, the shortest term at HG is about a year and half (me), underscores this thread's significance.

[GatorBrent]

Support changes every day for every company. The level of support is only going to be as good as the time you ask for it, the person you reach, and how well they are feeling.

All it takes is a few people to call off last minute or be late and you go from being overstaffed to overwhelmed.
I'm looking in our lvl1 support que right now and there 137 tickets open.

The oldest ticket is 2hr 51 minutes.
Six tickets down and it's 2 hrs 10 minutes

Over 75% of the tickets are less then an hour old.
About 30% of the tickets are less then 30 minutes old.


Believe it or not support has actually improved a TON from where we were exactly a year ago. I know this because we moved to texas one year ago this month and when we got here we had 100's of tickets open with most of them being over 6hours old. We were so busy I was even doing lvl1 tickets to help out. I'm extremely busy all the time so to even help out doing lvl1 tickets meant many 20hr work days.

I would say the quality of support has decreased a little bit in the last month and a half or so. The more tickets in que the quicker everyone tries to do them resulting in less reading going on. The more work you have the quicker you are going to do it, and the more mistakes you are going to make.

Sever uptime has increased DRASTICALLY and gets better every day. We now have an average of about 1 reboot a day where a year ago that was closer to six. (keep in mind we've doubled our servers from a year ago as well)

We've doubled the amount of signups we are doing a month as of recently, and are hitting a new record in sales once a week now. The increase in sales is has contributed to more tickets in que, more phone calls resulting in hold times at certain periods of the day. We'll go from no calls in que to 20 in a matter of minutes.

We are always working to improve support and NEVER stop hiring. I believe the new hiring campaigns we've been doing will result in hostgator's best support ever in the next few months. We our now spending 10k's a month advertising in magazines, websites, and word of mouth that we are hiring. We are about to run an ad in linux journal soon as well. If it wasn't for our recent growth we wouldn't be able to start recruiting some of the new talent that we are. If your're reading this and think you may be interested in a job pm me.

[GatorBrent]

Another thing that just struck me was we use to have a lot of cherry pickers taking all the one minute tickets. We don't have even a 3rd of this going on now that we use to.

This results in a lower hold time for older tickets, but a much longer hold time for brand new tickets.

[GvilleRick]

I've been lucky, I guess and although I have not had to submit many tickets all have been answered pretty quickly. I've been on both sides of the Help Desk and know what it feels like to have the queue growing faster than you can answer.

I've seen (and been guilty of) cherry picking to bump the total ticket count up. It's pretty easy to answer some of the basic questions that get submitted. The easiest solution to that is to have all the techs answer the tickets from the oldest one which does mean that if the customer replies to the ticket asking when it will be addressed, or adding information that it will be put at the bottom of the list. This is such a common problem that I think it would be a good idea to add it (in bold maybe) to the autoresponse that goes out when a ticket is submitted.

It's also a lot more common than you might think to have poorly worded tickets submitted. It used to really irritate me to have folks enter <I'm not going to give this out> in the password field, for example. There are some things that can only be tested completely if the techs have the log in information. It also never really impressed me to hear about how long someone had been working with computers/websites/etc. when sending in a ticket.

It is still interesting to me, though, that a post such as this is allowed in the forum. It's one of the reasons I moved my account here. My previous host has a number of moderators that are real quick to delete any post that even hints that they are not the perfect host. I posted a message saying why I was leaving and had the post removed, my posting privs removed, and (for a while) my IP blocked. And that post was pretty tame compared to some there are on here.

[Sam]

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

I believe the new hiring campaigns we've been doing will result in hostgator's best support ever in the next few months. We our now spending 10k's a month advertising in magazines, websites, and word of mouth that we are hiring.

Whom ever made the "HostGators Hiring" ads that are on WHT did a great job! nice and eyecatching

http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/1571326/101207_sky_hiring.gif

[gtgeorge]

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Another thing that just struck me was we use to have a lot of cherry pickers taking all the one minute tickets. We don't have even a 3rd of this going on now that we use to.

This results in a lower hold time for older tickets, but a much longer hold time for brand new tickets.

Thanks for the reply Brent. This shows that you are keeping an eye on things as I was hopeful that what I have experienced in the support department over the last couple of months won't continue as status quo.

When I came to HG over 2 and half years ago I was amazed with the support and quality of hosting. We are pleased with our 1st dedicated and have a dwindling use for support tickets. We are hopeful support will get faster than a 3+ hour wait with a response that requests info already in the ticket. (maybe we are spoiled from early experience?)

[Goddess Dix]

Originally Posted by gtgeorge

When I came to HG over 2 and half years ago I was amazed with the support and quality of hosting. We are pleased with our 1st dedicated and have a dwindling use for support tickets. We are hopeful support will get faster than a 3+ hour wait with a response that requests info already in the ticket. (maybe we are spoiled from early experience?)

HG support is, overall, very good, in fairness. I've had crappy support before and I know the difference! But I've seen clear evidence of HG growing pains while I've been here, and seen the support quaility flux pretty widely in terms of effectiveness and customer service.

You know, though, in those situations where something has to give, I would much, much rather the wait be longer than my tickets not getting read. That's infuriating from an customer persepctive. I go out of my way to include one issue per ticket, try to be as articulate as possible, and attempt to include all the relevant details. So when you open a one-paragraph support ticket and you're asked for the version number of software that was in that one paragraph as happened recently, you already feel like you're banging your head against a wall....In other words, when you have to pick emphasizing good or fast, please pick good.

I would also like to point out that I've gotten some great support that went above and beyond the call recently from Jamyn, Donald H. and Andre N, who's name I always love to see on a support ticket, because I know he'll read the whole ticket and whatever he does to fix it will be done right.

And I also very much appreicate Brent's directness in acknowledging there is room for improvement. That directness is why I"m here and why I recommend HG so highly to others. I can work with that, you know? So thanks for being honest and thanks for listening to us.

[kmaw]

I've been fortunate to not have much need for support in the last year. I've been around since Feb 2005 and, personally, have noticed an increase in response time but also an increase in quality...

As always -- I appreciate the honesty instead of stupid bullshit copywriting