Customer support is one of the biggest challenges of any business. Get it right and you’re instantly ahead of the competition. Get it wrong and it’ll keep coming back to haunt you.

In the web hosting industry, good support is crucial for your success – that and price are the main reasons people will choose you and recommend you. But great support is incredibly difficult, and it just becomes more of a challenge as your business grows. With that in mind, it’s extremely beneficial to streamline your support services and make them as efficient as possible to save you time and, more importantly, offer the best support you can to your customers.

Although this post is predominantly aimed at resellers looking to support their web hosting customers, pretty much all the tips can be used or adapted to suit any kind of online customer support, including that for web design customers.

Tip #1: Use welcome emails to your advantage

Once a customer has signed up, you can set an email to be sent to them automatically from the Reseller Control Centre, regardless of what software you’re using to manage your website and billing. This is a great opportunity to link to any useful information you have to help them get started with their hosting or introduce them to the services you provide. Adding a brief summary of what support they can expect from you and any resources (such as forums, databases or wikis) you run or recommend helps set the tone of your business from the outset.

Tip #2: Make support clear

As well as having your contact details on your homepage (or better still, in the header on every page), it’s also handy to have a separate page dedicated entirely to your support mechanisms and services. Letting your customers know how to get support, the different support channels you offer, and what times you offer support will save everyone time and hassle. It’s also worth outlining the advantages of the types of support you provide and why you’ve chosen to use them.

Tip #3: Use boilerplate responses selectively

If you offer any kind of text-based support, boilerplates (templated responses that you copy and paste) can come in handy in specific situations.

Boilerplate or template responses are useful in situations that repeatedly occur, for example if you have a customer looking to upgrade their services, wanting information about how to set something up, or if you’re requesting they take part in a survey or similar. However, it may make more sense for you to create support articles or blog posts for requests you get a lot…it’s your call.

Note that the true skill here is knowing when and how to use boilerplates successfully. Many companies try to automate as much of their support as possible, but cookie-cutter templates just don’t work for the vast majority of customer support requests, particularly in the web hosting industry. If you use templated responses, be very selective about the situations you use them in, or you could end up spending more time than you save and ending up with some very irate customers.

Tip #4: Match support channels to your resources

Live chat, phone support, ticket support, email support, social media support…it’s great to give your customers options, but make sure you’re taking on a realistic amount of work. It’s much better to do one channel brilliantly than to be mediocre at several. It’s likely that your business will also grow to favour (or be best at) one particular channel for one reason or another, so getting known for offering a high standard in that area has huge benefits. Remember that regardless of how many different types of support you offer, you need to accept the fact that you’re not going to please everyone all the time.

Tip #5: Make a clear social decision – and tell your customers about it

Decide whether you’re happy to offer support via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and update the support information on your website accordingly. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but you may find that keeping all your support in one place makes it much easier to keep track of what’s going on and the status of individual customer threads. You can always use social networks to direct customers to your more advanced support channels as required. If you decide to offer full customer support via social networks, make sure you list specific times on your profile and don’t be tempted to stray outside them or you’ll give customers a mixed message (not to mention stressing yourself out by never getting a break!).

Tip #6: Streamline with software

There are plenty of different paid and open source solutions for managing customer support. If you prefer to go down the free route, we offer one-click installs of osTicket, Trouble Ticket Express and Crafty Syntax Live Help, which you can install on a website of your choice directly from your control panel.

Helping your customers help themselves is also a great way to cut down on back-and-forth support. We also provide free one-click installs of MediaWiki, phpBB, Simple Machines, Vanilla Forums, bbPress and various other open communication platforms for customer-to-customer support and so you can create your own public support database.

What are your top tips for streamlining customer support? Let us know in the comments!