Different web hosting services have different ways of providing tech support. The most simplistic of all technical support methods is a forum. Your problems are solved by other customers who’ve previously ran into the same issues, and once in awhile someone who works for the company will have some sort of input. It’s an easy way to get an answer solved that isn’t top priority. However, most good companies don’t rely solely on this type of communication for customer support. A reputable company should, at the very least, have some sort of ticket system in place. A ticket system tracks long-term customer support issues and the steps that were taken in order to try to resolve them. This way, the tech support team doesn’t have to keep asking the same questions over and over again each time the customer calls in, or otherwise contacts them with a question or complaint. It can be far less annoying to the customer, save the tech support’s time, and get issues resolved much faster than they would without it.

In a ticket system environment, various methods of communication can be used. Usually, a ticket is submitted via the hosting provider’s website, and a reply will be given via e-mail containing various methods commonly used to resolve the issue. If that proves unsuccessful, the customer is told to contact tech support and give their ticket number to whomever it is they get in touch with. They can either call, use the live chat system, or choose to continue support through e-mail.

Live Chat:

Dealing with a live chat system isn’t exactly as productive as you’d think it would be. Some of the time, these people are trying to resolve up to 10 different people’s problems all at once. Even the simplest questions will seem to take an extremely long time to get an answer to. You’ll also notice that the messages from the tech support assistant seem to be far too formal for what they’re really saying. Many of their responses are simply copied and pasted from some text document or spreadsheet, then modified as necessary. It can take a long time to try and have a discussion this way, but some companies feel like it’s more effective to be slow and polite than concentrate on just answering questions.

E-mail Support:

One thing you don’t have the ability to do is keep the company’s attention when having a discussion through e-mail. Usually, e-mails are distributed randomly throughout the support team. Notes taken by the support team members on the ticket system are relied upon to make sense of the customer’s problems. Usually, this works fairly well. It also stops a tech support member from being frustrated with a customer that never seems to be happy with an answer they give. With e-mail support, team members can take their time to find a good answer to the problem the customer is facing, send it to them with detailed instructions, and if the customer still isn’t happy they end up replying to someone else. Though slower, e-mail support can actually be more reliable than live chat systems in certain situations.

Telephone Support:

For most people, this should be the #1 way to get a hold of the hosting company. It’s the most direct form of communication to possibly have. However, there’s two problems that can arise from it. The first is that in order for a small business (and most of these hosting companies are pretty small businesses) to hire enough tech support crew to handle customer calls, outsourcing has to occur and the customer is connected to a person where their native language may be different. In an effort to resolve any confusion, the tech support member will have a list of polite responses and their translations in front of them for reference. The other problem that arises from phone support is that somehow, a lot of companies don’t make the connection that their customers want to talk to a person about their troubles, not a machine. Pre-recorded responses are often presented to the customer in hopes to quickly answer their questions while saving the tech support’s time. Mostly this just winds up in the customer being more frustrated than they were to begin with though.