Outsourced Support
As one of our new features is outsourced support I thought I should say a bit about it. First off back in the day when I worked for a big hosting company at a datacenter, it was all on-site staff and they had a great thing for it and everyone was happy, but then the management changed and of course so did the staff. But instead of staying “on-site” they were one of the first hosting companies to start outsourcing.
Obviously at first this made me pretty angry, and I didn’t like the outsourcing market because they stole my job. But almost 8 years on now, I have had a lot of experience in many manners with outsourced staff. The experience I remember most was in 2002-04 where I was the team leader of a team which was outsourced so located in Pakistan. I obviously was not to thrilled, but I needed a job so could not turn it down. I was scared that their language would be terrible, that they would be lazy and not very skilled due to the low pay. I basically thought all of the bad things you could about outsourcing staff, but that all changed.
I will admit the first few weeks were a bit rough, fitting in and getting the staff to listen to me, but once we got over the first few hurdles I was pretty suprised. Firstly they were skilled and worked insanely hard - I would hire them over most other admins I have worked with, if I didnt prefer on-site staff. They were effecient, quick, and learnt very quickly. Okay so thats good you may say, but whats the point if their English is no good? Well… it was. It was pretty good. It was not as good and as fluent as someone who’s first language is English, and sometimes they sounded a bit over proffesional and not personal, but overall it was great. What was even better was that if I corrected them they never made the mistake again. It was like a dream team…. And there went my fear of outsourced hosting and I believe in it so much that I have even started offering it on our website.
Some companies do need on-site techs and it is a much better situation, but in my honest opinion, for the smaller companies it is a much better situation, its more cost effecient and allows companies to focus on other things, like sales or new services. I guess this post was for once a bit of an “advertisement” so I think I will cap it off with if you have any problems or questions, just ask us. We can even set up interviews now for outsourced staff, so it would just be like hiring your own staff member.