Do you outsource customer support?

Well,

It can be very very dangerous to outsource customer support. Customer support normally make people love or hate your business, based on the quality of your support.

Do the support yourself, at least until you're not able to handle it alone anymore.

No I don't... But my business does not requiere much! If my business grow very big in the future I will definetely outsource helpdesk. If costumers have questions they need to get help in under 24 hours (best before 12). This means that you can never take on vacation and just relax all day..

But... I will only hire people who I really trust as they will be representing my business. This means that I will never just hire an Indian on Odesk for 10 bucks a day. It have to be someone I already have a relationship with. This could be a friend in my hometown.. (of course with the right competences)

/Kragsig

Full time employee here. In fact, that's the first thing I'd recommend any serious IM'er to do: it frees up SO MUCH time from you!

If it will take so much out of your time, you can hire a full-time employee. It worked for me. I just make sure that the applicants go through a very thorough screening process.

Do you have your full time support staff in an office where you (or the manager) can periodically check on them?
If so, I'd imagine they do a better job then someone who's sitting at home and is constantly being distracted by TV, facebook and phones.

P.S. Thanks to the couple of warriors who offered their support services. Totally didn't expect this

It is essential for almost all kinds of businesses to have customer support one way or another, especially for establishments doing some or all of their business online.

The thing is hiring support staff actually depends on your capacity. You see, you only hire support staff if you can't handle customer support yourself. Basically, a support staff is an extension of yourself towards your customers.

Actually, an on-site or virtual support staff doesn't actually matter as long as you train them well and gave them targets, restrictions, and certain powers and means almost perfectly. The only main difference is that it's harder to supervise a virtual staff but it's relatively cheaper (nowadays) to have virtual staff.

Remember, part time or full time, virtual or on-site, and to hire or not to hire, these are questions that mainly can be answered by your businesses' situation in terms of quantity of customers (and customers in need) and also the amount of income you can and be willing to spend on customer support. Also, customer support is an extension of YOU and your business so be sure to train them well and take care of them.

To take care of your support staff, well a decent pay is a good start. Also, try to have incentive programs that will both make them feel good and also make them perform better.

I do both - for certain products that require more in depth support I have to do myself. For instance I have a few products in the gaming niche and you need to know the "gaming" talk in order to provide efficient support.

With some of the games being very in-depth I could outsource it but the time it would take me to explain would defeat the object of outsourcing.

With standard products however and "Ive lost the download page" etc.. type support questions it is well worth doing.

Yes. Indeed they bring up a better result in handling the business customers more effective. Even if its a product/service oriented, we do require customer support and this is not followed by most of the industries, wherein they're suppose to lose their customers.

At times, when a business wants to target certain other portion, probably you can opt to outsource customer support services. They do mark up a with a new beginning for your business, I suppose.