With more and more hosting companies outsourcing their development and support teams to outside the UK, setting up offices in countries such as Romania and the Philippines, the long term impact on their business will be detrimental.
The initial cost savings will inevitably be outweighed by a fall in customer satisfaction and service reputation within the market, which in turn will affect sales and the bottom line. As committed and as knowledgeable as they will be in the new support offices, to deal with technical issues in a foreign language without a pre-formatted and binding conversation decision tree in front of them is asking a lot.
As a customer I want to know that if I have a problem of any kind I will be able to get in contact with someone who can answer the question quickly with minimal cost and effort on their part and the perception is that the support team needs to be based in the UK to do this.
A quick search using Google’s keyword tool can show you how many people search for your service using ‘UK’ in the search phrase. For example, for ‘web hosting’ Google reports approx 300,000 searches for ‘web hosting’ in January 2009 and approx 35,000 for UK related web hosting search terms. That suggests to me that being based in the UK with UK support is important to our potential customers and we should make it clear on our website and marketing they can find that at Heart Internet. In short, if you provide UK based support make it clear on your website to let potential customers know.
Easily accessible UK support should be a fundamental part of any business, not just hosting because I’ve heard it so many times how people hate being put through to foreign call centres where it’s often difficult to understand the accents.
A couple of my own customers have already told me what they like about my service is that they can just pick up the phone and speak to me directly so it does tell me it’s an important thing from a customer point of view.
I read somewhere that Fasthosts was next to start outsourcing but I’m of the opinion that it’s a good thing because the fewer companies with UK support the better chances we have of gaining extra customers.
I’ve never thought of boasting UK based support on my web site before, so thanks for that tip Mathew.