Your company's website is not a virtual place located in another Internet reality. This is the same real thing as a printer, laptop or car. What do they have in common? All this is complex equipment that requires regular maintenance and updates. Without them, it will very quickly cease to perform its functions.

Likewise, the site requires constant testing, troubleshooting, and timely improvements. Otherwise, a sudden failure will lead to loss of sales ready leads and reduced profits.

What does website technical support do:

• Develops and implements functions into the website structure that make it simpler, understandable and convenient for users;
• Engaged in the redesign of certain blocks in order to maintain the relevance of information and maintain the modern appearance of the site;
• Performs regular tuning of the control panel for marketers, which should provide them with access to content management at any time;
• Provides integration with any services that a company may require, for example, for e-commerce sites these are one of the most common elements of the sales engagement model;
• Solves problems with viruses and repels hacker attacks

If your business does not stand still, then the amount of work on the site is steadily growing along with it. And then you decide whether to hire more employees, find a conscientious freelancer who will work on the site remotely, or entrust all technical support issues to an outsourcing company? Let's look at the pros and cons of each option.

Hiring your own specialist

Pros:

• You get a person whose entire working time will be devoted to maintaining your site.

Cons:

• Hiring a personal assistant/assistant/specialist places the responsibility on you not only to pay the new employee a salary, but also to pay taxes, insurance, etc.
• Solving routine HR management issues takes more time due to staff growth.
• You will have to train a new employee and adapt him to the team.

Contacting a freelancer

Pros:

• You pay money only after the work has been completed, no extra expenses.

Cons:

• The freelancer rarely devotes his time to a single client. In addition to your website, he will be working on other people’s projects, which can cause the quality of work to suffer and delivery deadlines to be missed.
• The freelancer does not care about creating the highest level of customer service in your agency; he simply completes the task received.
• The freelancer may simply be an irresponsible person, which you may not find out right away.
• If the freelancer provides one-time services, when integrating, for example, a payment system into your website, you will be left without long-term support and in case of any problem you will be forced to look for a new specialist.
• There is a risk of confidential data leakage, which cannot be completely mitigated even by signing an NDA.

Contacting an outsourcing company

Pros:

• Caring for this segment of your business with all its current and future problems passes into the hands of people who professionally provide back office support services, organize remote call centers, provide technical support for websites, etc.

Cons:

• There is none of them.

First. You don’t need to look for anyone, conduct interviews, or train newcomers in their responsibilities. A team of professionals has been formed before you and already knows how to act harmoniously.

Second. By concluding a contract once, you receive long-term service.

Third. As a rule, outsourcing companies have different service packages, so you will have the opportunity to choose the option that best suits the specifics of your business.

And finally, this approach is economical, since you do not include bpo employees in your staff, but pay them for results. So the choice is obvious.

Its cost depends on several components and varies depending on whether you turn to a private executor or a company.

The rates of individual freelancers are unpredictable. An inexperienced contractor will charge several hundred dollars, but the quality of his service will be appropriate, while a qualified specialist may charge several thousand. The complexity of the task and timing will also play a role.

In my experience, European and US companies that outsource usually have a pricing plan that stipulates a certain number of support hours per month at a fixed cost. This eliminates unpredictable costs, ensures that rates are not raised at the most inopportune moment, and ensures quality.

The tariff plan specifies the number of hours of work of a technical support specialist per month and their cost, and also indicates the amount of payment for additional hours and the possibility of providing services beyond those specified in the plan. When my agency was just starting to grow, I often resorted to the experience of familiar owners of outsourcers in the UK, in particular, I used the idea of dividing tariffs into basic, optimal and premium. But the basic set of services is the same for each package:

• Continuous monitoring of site performance;
• Virus checking;
• Saving a backup copy of data on remote media;
• Interaction with the hosting company;
• Conducting consultations on CMS;
• Improvement of functionality;
• Design development and content management.

By concluding an agreement with a client, our agency provides him with a personal manager who remains aware of all the customer’s problems, helps find optimal solutions for them and guarantees high quality performance.

Like all leading business process outsourcing companies of the United States, we provide technical support services for sites of many CMS: HTM, Wordpress, Nuxt, ModX, Vue, Bitrix, Laravel, React, as well as specialized management systems.