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How we work to deliver the best hosting support in the UK

15 July 2019

Stuart

If you’ve researched more than a couple of web hosts, chances are that when it comes to support claims, you’ve seen enough hyperbole to make your head spin: World class, industry leading, legendary.

The flowery prose can be a little much at times, and in fairness we’re not shy when shouting about our services either. But how many companies talk about when things go wrong?

We’re only human…

Another cliched idiom aside, the simple fact of the matter is that we all make mistakes. Even with nearly two decades in the business, errors happen for a variety of reasons. We work hard to implement procedures to prevent mistakes, but sometimes things just don’t work out as we’d like.

What we’ve learned over those twenty years is that like it or not, mistakes do happen, and it’s best to own them when they do. Which is the point of this post (ohhh he does actually have one, I hear you in the back!)

How we handle a case when things go wrong

First things first, any time we close a support ticket, the person who opened the case will receive a “how did we do” feedback request to the same email address. This is a completely automated system that no one can intervene in. If your case goes over seven days with no interaction, we will also close the case, prompting the feedback mechanism to kick in.

We’ll ask you how the case was handled: Did we resolve everything for you? How as the support agent? If the case needs more work or you’re unhappy with the support received, you can let us know via the feedback system.

The feedback results are in turn available only to our directorial team, and 99% of the time reviewed by myself. If you rate your case anything less than good, you’ll hear from me in person. It might sound strange, but when things don’t pan out I’m eager to get in touch and make things right. Again, we know that mistakes are going to happen, it’s just an inescapable fact of life; but the silver lining is that we get to learn and improve. Today’s mistake is hopefully tomorrow’s improved process.

At this point I’ll do my best to find out what went wrong and ensure the case is turned around. Sometimes the fault is ours, sometimes the client might have messed up, sometimes it’s just an unfortunate series of events and complications. By this stage though, blame is less important than the solution, and we do our best to make sure that whatever else has happened, we’ve resolved the case.

With our client hopefully happy and the case resolved, I’ll feedback to our support team manager who also reviews what happened, looking for ways to prevent a future recurrence. This usually results in a one to one with a member of our support team for additional training. It’s not uncommon for case reviews to lead to entirely new approaches to the way particular types of cases are handled.

We also keep a running tally of our overall support score. We review our own services as dispassionately as possible against this weekly, monthly and annual value. Our goal for all three is to an average a consistent support rating of 4.5/5.0 or higher. The number is based on the support scores from all closed cases. It goes without saying that we love your feedback, good and bad. Every time you complete a support feedback request, you’re contributing to those scores.

This really matters to us

Back to that opening paragraph though, how do you know this isn’t just more breathless promises on my part, more smoke and mirrors? Hopefully the results of our hard work speak for themselves and you’ve already experienced our legendary, world class and industry leading support first hand (sorry I couldn’t resist!)

If not, you can review half a decade of feedback via Trustpilot here and decide for yourself if we genuinely care, or are just paying lip service.

Stuart

Stuart

Hi! I am the the co-founder of 34SP.com and Business Development Director; I've been at this hosting lark for more than twenty two years, ulp.. I oversee multiple areas of our business to ensure 34SP.com products and services are meeting our customer's needs. You can get in touch over on LinkedIn or replying to any of most posts. In my spare time I am exceptionally interested in food and drink, I run several food website and am a multi-award winning, food and drink writer.