Reseller Series: Supporting Your Clients
You really don’t want your clients to call you. Not ever. You don’t want to hear a peep out of any of them whatsoever, at all - because when you hear from your clients, it usually means one of two things:
- Something is broken.
- What you are offering isn’t clear, and they’re confused.
Now, the first thing you can’t really do anything about - granted, we can, and we do. One of the advantages to going with a smaller company is that we’re looking at every server, every single day as opposed to larger companies that have too many servers to actually hang out on and who are only alerted that something has gone wrong when the “Oh, crap, it’s down!” alarm goes off. Now, we have those alarms, too, but we’re a bit more proactive about trying to avoid the things that wake them up than larger companies can be simply because each server is 1/4 of our business.
The second you can do something about, and that’s where good documentation comes in. As a reseller, you have somewhat of an advantage in that you can mercilessly rip us off for the most part, as long as you’re paying us - since you’re our reseller, we want you to get big and upgrade. Then we want you to outgrow a shared box and get a VPS, then we want you to outgrow that and get a server, and then we want you to outgrow that and get many servers, and then we want you to overtake us so we can sell you our clients and retire to Tahiti.
Ok, I’m kidding about that last part, but you get the point - since we want you to grow, we welcome you to take whatever it is that we have built up for the past ten years that helps you do that. The data center that we started out at 10 years ago let us use their stuff, and that was our starting documentation. Generally, it’s how most people start - ripping off whoever they are reselling for.
Nowadays, though, manuals and text directions aren’t as good as the flash demo. We have switched most of that tediously written documentation over to flash demos because (a) most folks have flash and (b) most people’s eyes don’t glaze over quite as fast when they are watching a movie that shows them step by step how to perform an action and it is easier for people to understand something when it is visually shown to them. What isn’t covered in a flash demo is usually swept into sound byte chunks backended to a searchable knowledge base, or FAQ section.
Most people do not read a treatise on their hosting anymore - and they used to. People really wanted to understand it. Now, not so much - they want it up, they want it done, and they don’t want to have to understand why it works the way that it works, they just want to know how to get from point A to point B. These two forms of information are an excellent compliment to each other enabling the imparting of quick, clear, and precise information.
Now you have to learn flash, and create the demos.
Ok, I’m kidding - again, there are companies that do these demos professionally, and you can get them in a day or so branded. The previous “It Girl” was demodemo.com and we have used them. DemoDemo produces a quality product - however, our particular choice is DemoWolf.
Demowolf allows leasing of the demos, which is (in my opinion) vastly superior to owning the demos themselves due to the rapid advancement and changes in many control panels and software products. If you purchase a slate of demos and that product changes visually next month or the way to do something is completely different, you’re stuck with outdated demos that don’t adequately reflect the current product you are offering and worse, may confuse people when what they see in the demo is not what they see on the site.
This is the web - things change fast. We must have purchased and re-purchased the same set of demos 4 times before Demowolf showed up, and we’ve been happy with the cost and their quality.
One particular world of warning with their demos - make sure that you take a look at the Demowolf HTML files and you change the Meta information in them before uploading them to your site and using them. Demowolf places their own meta information advertising their own service in their files. Kudos to them for gumption, but if it’s your site, you want your own meta information don’t want to unknowingly be serving another company’s meta-information advertising someone else for free unless it’s your choice (or it’s required, like a “powered by” statement).
The cost of the lease per package varies, and without speech directions is in the neighborhood of $3-$4.
As far as knowledge bases, it’s almost impossible to recommend just one. Hopefully, your billing choice will come with it integrated but if it doesn’t, set aside two days and start googling ” knowledge base software”, test some out, and find one that merges into your own design and does not take it over . There really are such an amazing amount of choices that it could take up an article series on its own.
