Are Flash Hosting Tutorials Worth It? Published: Aug 26, 2004

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In an effort to assist hosting companies in reducing overall customer support costs, in 2002 DemoDemo.com pioneered the ultimate customer support and help desk aide – the online hosting tutorial.

The single largest expense facing hosting companies today is its supports costs.  Typically, they will see close to 50 percent of their monthly expense go to customer support. Costs are driven up by customer inquiries that often deal with routine and seemingly simple tasks. How do I set up my email? How do I FTP my site to the server? How do I make DNS changes? These are just a few of the most commonly asked questions. In an effort to assist hosting companies in reducing overall customer support costs, in 2002 DemoDemo.com pioneered the ultimate customer support and help desk aide – the online hosting tutorial.

Flash tutorials, when properly produced, keep the viewer’s attention throughout. Of course, it is also essential to design the tutorials in a concise format.The key is to keep them short, dynamic, informative and easy to follow. Each DemoDemo tutorial covers one specific task. When your customers want to know how to perform a task, they simply click to play, sit back and actually see how it’s done. Visual by nature, people prefer to see how it’s done rather than read how it’s done. It’s basic human nature.

Generally, web hosts will place our tutorials in their Help Desk or Customer Service areas. One particularly effective method is to include links to the tutorials in the Welcome Email sent out to new customers. Many web hosts report an immediate drop in support tickets by as much as 80%. When you consider that support generally accounts for approximately 50% of a typical web host’s monthly expenses, that’s a lot of savings!

With a visual aid such as an online tutorial, end users can open a browser window and view the tutorial while performing the tasks in a separate window. And with a DemoDemo tutorial, the user can stop, pause, rewind and start at any time. This allows full control,  allowing the customer to set the pace in the lesson.

The reality is that customers don’t want to read long boring FAQs to learn how to perform a task. If they can’t figure it out, they are more than likely going to e-mail or call, driving your overall support costs higher. DemoDemo tutorials enable hosting companies to provide their clients with an alternative source of information that is concise, informative and easy to follow. They are so effective that sending in a support ticket becomes entirely unnecessary – exactly what hosting providers are hoping for.

But what it boils down to in the end is reducing overhead. Flash tutorials are a very cost effective way for a web host to significantly reduce support costs…and show customers how to get the job done without having to submit a ticket. You will now find over 1200 tutorials available at DemoDemo.com.

Vito Ceniti
www.demodemo.com
[email protected]
866.811.0911