Constant email support requests

[paulw32]

We seem to have reached a critical mass point where we are hosting so many clients that almost every day we are getting calls about email issues. It's very rarely an issue with any settings in cpanel, it's usually something simple like a client has reached their storage quota, or they've got a new device and can't seem to connect, or the firewall has blocked a device (usually a MAC) for too many failed login attempts.
These minor little tech support calls are taking up a lot of time. And while we can charge for some support cases, it's generally not worth it as it takes us away from other more important tasks.
There's also the issue of damaging customer relationships when you point out "user error" to clients who aren't tech-savvy and then send them an invoice for your time.
Some of our team are suggesting that we start pushing clients towards externally hosted email solutions like G-Suite, but I feel like that will produce its own range of support issues that are just as time-consuming.
Would love to hear from any other users on how they deal with this issue and if anyone has any suggestions on how to limit time spent dealing with these calls?

 

[GOT]

Congrats on your success.

You could always outsource your tier1 support to another company, usually offshore. You have to question wether you can offer phone based support especially if you are in the cheap hosting category. If you are charging 50 a year for hosting it's economically infeasible to take even one 30 minute phone call a year from that client.

 

[cPanelLauren]

I second the congrats on your success! Something we do at cPanel for support is called deflection. Essentially we utilize available resources to deflect tickets using the KCS process

One of the methods we use for this is an elastic search in the ticket system (ZenDesk based) which suggests KB articles on what you're entering in the search box. Zendesk has metrics and statistics we can use to see how effective the KB articles are (if a user clicks the article then proceeds to open a ticket or if they stopped after reading the article). If a search term is constantly entered and the user either doesn't click the article or they click it and continue to open a ticket we know that either the article title or the article itself is not serving its purpose.

Another really useful thing we do is called "Just in Time" knowledge capture, essentially an analyst working a ticket can create a KB article out of that ticket response to no only help other analysts but customers as well when they go to open a ticket about the same thing.

The forums here are a method of deflection, and it's why I (primarily) and other staff works in the forums.

Easily available and relevant knowledge is key in my opinion to deflect some of those common questions/tickets. An FAQ might be a solution on your ticket system, something like read our FAQ before you open a ticket, etc.