With a decade of experience, and call centers located in South Carolina, California, and India, National Support Center offers reliable support for ISPs.

by Jeff Goldman [September 3, 2003]

Ron Johnson founded National Support Center back in 1994, long before many of his current competitors had even considered offering technical support for ISPs. "The Internet was just getting going at that time, and we found our niche," he said. "Most people don't want to do tech support: it's one of those headaches that people will just about throw money at you to get you to do."

He bought his first telephone switch used, with Blue Cross/Blue Shield announcements still on it, and began promoting his service. "I basically used an early form of spam," he said. "I began emailing everybody on TheList.com. Out of the first 50 emails, I got 30 responses, and signed up nine people within ten weeks. That was ten years ago."

National Support Center	Voice: (800) 203-7961

The company's offering, Johnson says, is simple to explain. "We offer phone support for ISPs," he said. "That's 99 percent of our business right there. We answer the phone as the ISP, the technician takes the call, solves their problem for them, logs it, and the logs are viewable by the ISP. And it's transparent; the person doesn't know he's not talking to an employee of the ISP."

Location, location, location
National Support Center makes use of three different call centers: one in South Carolina, one in California, and one in India. The center in India offers both online chat and phone support—at prices 15 to 20 percent lower than those at the U.S. call centers. "Some clients would rather pay the premium and keep it here in the U.S., so we provide all three options," Johnson said.

The center in California also provides redundancy for the company's American clients. "We only own a part of it," Johnson said. "They're a competitor of ours: I have some of my accounts over there, and he has some of his with me. We work together, so if California has an earthquake, we just call Sprint, and all of his numbers get routed to my center."

The call center in India is run by a partner in the company who used to work with National Support Center in South Carolina. "He has a good handle on our environment, and he also of course has a good handle on his own home environment," Johnson said. "We lease part of the call center there, and we hire our own employees."

Tracking the tickets
Reporting for ISP clients is straightforward: Every ISP receives a daily report that lists the number of calls received, number abandoned, average call time, and average queue time. ISPs also have access to the ongoing ticket list, which lets them take over customer issues if necessary.

The ticket list, Johnson says, allows an ISP to maintain ownership of the customer relationship. If a customer talks to someone at the ISP directly, that person can handle tickets just as National Support Center would. "The ISP can look up a ticket online and see what we said and what we did, and they can remedy the situation right then and there," Johnson said.

For a new ISP, the setup process is equally straightforward. "Our contract's been looked at so many times that there's very little to do," Johnson said. "There's a questionnaire with about 45 questions to go through and answer, because everybody has a different business model. It all has to be set up. It usually happens in about three or four days."

Keeping it simple
Pricing can be structured per-subscriber, per-minute, or per-incident, though Johnson says most ISPs choose per-subscriber pricing. "It covers a percentage of the subscriber base," he said. "We charge you with the idea that only 25 percent of your subscriber base is going to call us every month, and if it goes over that, we have a surcharge that gets added to it."

Other services being planned for the future include remote diagnostics and co-browsing. "Co-browsing should be a big thing for us," Johnson said. "You can click a 'help me' button, and besides chatting with the technician or the agent, you have a little cursor that changes both your screen and his at the same time. People seem to like that a lot better than having to pick up their phone and wait on hold."

In the long run, though, the company's real value proposition comes down to offering basic technical support over the phone, something that National Support Center has now been doing for a decade. "Ours is a very simple business model," Johnson said. "All of our stuff has to do with the Internet in one way or another, and that's pretty much it."

— End

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