Getting Help With Help

What do you do when you're overwhelmed with calls to your help desk? We provide an overview of one option: outsourcing the help desk.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 14, 2000]

For small ISPs, customer service can be a serious headache. However good your people are, at some point, you may find yourself on the line, answering calls or emails when you should be building the business.

But customer service is an ISP's most intimate contact with its clientele. Will an outsourcing firm care as much about your customers, as you do? Can an outsourcing firm be held accountable for any failure in its tech support?

We look at several companies that will manage your help desk for you.

Nationalsupportcenter.com
One such help desk service calls itself the National Support Center. Located in South Carolina, it serves 150,000 subscribers through 20 ISPs nationwide (none in South Carolina). That's an average customer size of 7,500 subscribers, although some ISPs are larger and some have fewer than 1,000 subscribers.

Ron Johnson, the owner, told us that he founded the company, "five years ago, and like most ISPs, we started off in a garage and grew very very fast. We've never advertised. Instead, we relied on word-of-mouth. Also, when our clients were bought or merged into larger companies, they tended to bring us with them."

He says that his service is transparent. "People don't usually know they're calling us." And since most of the problems are "at the client end" it's just a matter of being patient and going over the client's setup.

At press time, National Support Center charged $2 per subscriber per month, plus toll free phone charges. Reduced rates were available for ISPs with a subscriber base of larger than 10,000.

Shadow Solutions
CORRECTION: Shadow Solutions no longer provides help for ISPs.

Their pricing system was interesting, starting at $3.35 per customer per month for 1000 customers, decreasing as the total number of customers increases.

EnvisioNet
EnvisioNet hit the news in January when it signed a second contract with MSN that could double the size of the company. For a small ISP, working with a company that owes half its business to Microsoft may not be ideal. Other large clients include include Prodigy Internet, JuniorNet, Internet Appliance Network, and Grolier Interactive.

Founded in 1995, EnvisioNet has more than 1,000 employees serving 20 Internet companies. The company is based in Maine.

Next Page
Page 2: More expensive solutions, and the conclusion.