Competitors benchmarking
Are you a web host and do you want to grow, make money and succeed?
Then you probably
need to compete with other web hosting companies. If you know your competitors, you can effectively fight to gain the territory: the customer.
Of course, all this is not new.
What does the benchmarking include?
We have been focusing in web hosting industry since 2000. Lately we have specialized,
among others, in web hosts' customer support testing. What does it involve? There
are five stages in benchmarking web hosts:
- setting up the methodology
- collecting the information (please see Web host's customer support audit
for details)
- analyzing the information and intelligent data mining
- interpreting results and exploring trends and patterns
- presenting results in the report.
It is the analysis and interpretation stages of the benchmarking process that add value. Using such information
in decision making should lead to right decisions being made.
Sample Summary Report
For many reasons we can not present very detailed and current reports
here. The
same fact concerns also the benchmarking methodology. However the following example summary report shows what kind of
information we can supply.
The gathered data comes from the real customer support testing that we performed in the
United Kingdom web hosting market in January and March 2006.
Among the monitored
companies there were
1&1 Internet and
Hostway (the UK branch offices in both cases). We asked non-professional questions as well as the expert questions simulating customers with different backgrounds.
All together we have sent 106 testing requests to their customer support departments during two months:
| Time zone |
Number of requests |
|
1&1 Internet |
Hostway |
Total |
| e-mail |
phone |
e-mail |
phone |
| Total |
30 |
23 |
30 |
23 |
106 |
| Office hours |
15 |
8 |
15 |
8 |
46 |
| Night |
7 |
8 |
7 |
8 |
30 |
| Weekend |
8 |
7 |
8 |
7 |
30 |
The question is:
who provides better customer support, 1&1 Internet or Hostway?
Here is what we have found out. Please note that the below presented summary report
gives very limited and rough view compared to the standard benchmarking report.
The average evaluation is based on our five-point evaluating system.
| Company |
1&1 Internet |
Hostway |
Average evaluation of
e-mail answers |
4.47  |
4.13 |
|
Average evaluation of phone responses |
4.00  |
4.26 |
Comparison graph
(average evaluation of
e-mail and phone answers) |
 |
|
Average e-mail response time |
124 hours (cca 5 days)  |
1 hour 13 mins
|
|
Unanswered e-mails percentage and average response time |
 |
 |