PC Helpline supports a wide range of ISPs, including both wired and wireless providers of all sizes.

by Jeff Goldman [May 18, 2005]

PC Helpline was founded in December of 2000 and incorporated in April of 2001. The company was originally founded as My PC Helpline, with the aim of providing technical support for everyone from home users to corporate helpdesks. More recently, however, the newly renamed PC Helpline shifted its home user business over to a separate consumer division called Easy Helpdesk.

The company now has four separate divisions: ISP Support, Desktop Support, Web Hosting Support, and Thin Client Application Support.

According to Dan Sturgill, PC Helpline's Vice President of Business Development, the company began offering ISP support in response to inquiries from potential customers—and ISPs now form PC Helpline's largest customer base.

PC Helpline Voice: (866) 305-8995 info@pchelpline.com

Sturgill says smaller ISPs and startups continue to be PC Helpline's fastest-growing group of customers. Although they're a challenge to support (due to a significant per-sub call rate), Sturgill says that getting involved at that level is often worthwhile. "With smaller ISPs, you help them start up, and you can develop a relationship that may last for many, many years," he says.

Hotels, Wi-Fi, and VoIP
The company works with a wide variety of different ISP customers, including both wired and wireless providers. It now supports more than 500,000 end users, including 200,000 ISP subscribers and 20,000 hotel rooms—PC Helpline supports the high-speed Internet connections for over ten different hotel chains, including Chase, Comfort Suites, Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Plaza Suites, Super 8, and Woodfin Suites.

And Sturgill says the company continues to look at new ways to target its support services. "We're getting ready to ramp up VoIP support," he says. "We've found that it falls within the core competency of our guys, so we're going to offer it—a lot of our ISPs happen to also be telcos, bundling things, so it just makes sense to do it."

All calls are handled from the company's call center in Victoria, British Columbia—which Sturgill says gives ISPs a "near-shore" option, allowing them to take on outsourced support that doesn't come from outside North America.

Pricing for the service is published on the company's website, starting at $1.50 per user per month for up to 1,000 users, and going down to $0.60 per user for 15,000 users or more:

• 1-1,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $1.50 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 1,001-2,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $1.35 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 2,001-3,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $1.20 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 3,001-4,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $1.05 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 4,001-5,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $0.90 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 5,001-7,500 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $0.75 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 7,501-10,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $0.70 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 10,001-15,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $0.65 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• 15,001-20,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: $0.60 per subscriber/hotel room, per month
• Over 20,000 Subscribers/Hotel Rooms: Call for a custom quote

In addition to per subscriber or per hotel room pricing, both per seat and per incident pricing models are available. Webhosting support is also available, for $1.00 per hosted domain per month.

Reporting and monitoring
Maintaining a positive relationship with each ISP, Sturgill says, is crucial for the company. A number of articles about outsourcing issues are available on PC Helpline's website to help clients understand their options. All contracts have quarterly review periods, during which any ISP can opt out with no penalty. "We allow the ISP to walk away if they want to," Sturgill says.

All support is fully branded to the ISP, and comes with access to a web interface that provides information on current calls as well as past call records. ISP owners can also enter their own notes regarding customer issues into the system, which PC Helpline's techs will see if they access that ticket in response to a customer's call. A new tracking system, currently being implemented, will provide online access to all call data in real time.

For an ISP new to PC Helpline, the integration process is straightforward. "We'll request a user dump in a comma-delineated file so we can build the existing user base into our database," Sturgill says. "Then 99 percent of ISPs send a welcome e-mail when a new user joins. We have a tracking address that a carbon copy of those e-mails are sent to, and those items are added right into the database."

Remote monitoring is also available for an ISP's network devices. "We use a product that monitors and pings IP/port combinations on set intervals," Sturgill says. "Upon multiple failures within a prescribed time, our techs receive an e-mail alert, in which case they'll manually test it. A lot of times, we're able to escalate these things to the ISP before we've received a single user call."

— End

Related articles:
	[Dec. 27, 2002]	We Need Cheap Overnight Tech Support
	[Sept. 15, 2000]	Outsourcing Your Affiliate Program
	[Sept. 22, 1999]	Startup Concerns

Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart