Targeting markets
In the web hosting industry borders do not mean much. It is very easy to reach
customers all around the globe. If you are a web hosting company targeting the foreign
market, you might want to know some information before occupying the new territory.
Let us say you are a web host who plans on expanding to emerging markets.
As a part of your export strategy the need of effective communication and customer
support will arise. The different market will most likely embody different customer
support level standards.
How does the market comparison work?
The comparison of the customer support behaviour in different markets is very similar to the competitors benchmarking.
The process consists of the following steps:
- defining the measured figures in the desired markets
- 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, opportunities and
threats
- presenting results in the report.
Again the analysis and interpretation steps are the critical stages where we locate
and extract the patterns. The comprehensive valuable information for further management
decisions is what we really deliver.
Sample Summary Report
Let us assume that you need to support your web hosting customers in the country
where you spread your operations. We bring you a sample report - brief comparison of developed United Kingdom and emerging Czech web hosting markets.
You can then assess whether such summary would be useful or not for you.
The gathered data comes from the real web hosts' customer support tests that we performed in the
United Kingdom and Czech Republic in January and March 2006.
For each market we have chosen three leading web hosting
companies as a particular market representation. We have
used the
same methodology and asked both non-professional and expert questions.
All together we have sent 318 requests to six web hosts during two months:
| Time zone |
Number of requests |
United Kingdom
(3 web hosts) |
Czech republic
(3 web hosts) |
Total |
| e-mail |
phone |
e-mail |
phone |
| Total |
90 |
69 |
90 |
69 |
318 |
| Office hours |
45 |
24 |
45 |
24 |
138 |
| Night |
21 |
24 |
21 |
24 |
90 |
| Weekend |
24 |
21 |
24 |
21 |
90 |
In
which country web hosts provide better customer support, in the United Kingdom
or Czech Republic?
Our findings prove that a web host customer gets better support in the Czech
Republic. The most significant difference concerns the e-mail response
time and the phone support in the night.
Please note that the below mentioned table presents very limited view and in fact
is only a partial extraction of the full-featured report.
The average evaluation is based on our five-point evaluating system.
|
Item |
United Kingdom |
Czech republic |
Average evaluation of
e-mail answers |
Office hours -
4.29 |
overall 4.32
 |
Office hours -
4.38 |
overall 4.33
|
|
Night -
4.52 |
Night -
4.05 |
|
Weekend -
4.21 |
Weekend -
4.50 |
Average evaluation of
phone responses |
Office hours -
4.20 |
overall 4.00
 |
Office hours -
4.50 |
overall 4.67
|
|
Night -
3.66 |
Night -
4.75 |
|
Weekend -
4.18 |
Weekend -
4.76 |
Comparison graph
(average evaluation of
e-mail and phone answers) |
 |
Average e-mail
response time |
53 hours  |
7 hours 31 mins
 |
Unanswered e-mails percentage
and average response time |
 |
 |