Top-notch Tutors

DemoDemo hosting tutorials are an innovative and cost-effective way for hosting companies to reduce overall support costs and increase customer satisfaction.

“It came to me at 5:00am on a Monday morning,” says DemoDemo President Vito Ceniti. The idea? Online Web hosting tutorials. “The moment I introduced this to the Web hosting industry, they jumped on it and haven’t looked back.” Launched in September of 2002, DemoDemo was first to market with the Web hosting tutorial concept and remains the market’s only major supplier.

The single largest expense facing hosting companies today is its supports costs. Ceniti notes that hosting companies will see close to 50 percent of their monthly expense go to customer support. Costs are driven up by the many customer inquiries that often deal with routine and seemingly simple tasks. In an effort to assist hosting companies in reducing overall customer support costs, DemoDemo pioneered the ultimate customer support and help desk aide – the online hosting tutorial.

So what exactly are these things? Quite simply, they “are Flash-based (graphic animation) online tutorials that Web hosts offer their end user customers to help them walk through the routine tasks involved with hosting their Web sites,” explains Ceniti. Customers are able to view short, Flash-based movies that show users how to complete particular hosting tasks in a step-by-step fashion. The topics include control panel usage, database setups, and other common ancillary tasks such as FTP, DNS changes and setting up POP mail accounts.

Click here to view a sample tutorial

The success rates are astounding. “We’ve had reports from existing customers where it shows a reduction in support costs anywhere from 50-90 percent for tickets related to the topics covered by the tutorials,” says Ceniti. And reduced tickets ultimately translate into profits – definitely a hot commodity in today’s highly competitive hosting market.

The main attraction of these tutorials is that they are visually-based. It is the main reason why online tutorials are much preferred over FAQ’s or long pages of text. “People are visual by nature,” explains Ceniti. It is much easier to understand something when you can see how it is done visually rather than trying to figure it out after reading about it in words. “Presenting customers with a very well documented FAQ might be effective if you are able to capture the reader’s attention…but a lot of people lose their attention span (this is particularly acute online)…and they end up sending in a support ticket.” The solution is to present hosting customers with a simpler more elegant alternative. With a visual aid such as an online tutorial, they can open a browser window and view the tutorial while performing the tasks in a separate window. And with an online tutorial, you can stop, pause, rewind and start at any time. “It really holds your hand all the way through,” says Ceniti.

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

DemoDemo tutorials are sold on a one-time purchase basis. There are no licensing fees or recurring charges. An average tutorial bundle (with ten single tutorials) costs between $50-60. If just one customer watches a tutorial rather than sending in a support ticket – imagine how fast the savings add up. That’s right, many times over to the point where the tutorial easily pays for itself.

Customization of DemoDemo’s tutorials is also available for hosts with specific needs and requirements. “The average price for a custom tutorial is $75, obviously a lot more expensive…but we have to build it from the ground up on a custom basis,” explains Ceniti. Requests for customization are not uncommon. “There have been lots of people we have already dealt with on a custom tutorial basis…they want their own information on the site…and we will accommodate them. But for the most part, the generic tutorials that are branded are sufficient for most hosts out there.” All DemoDemo tutorials are custom branded for the purchasing host. When “we receive a logo image from the customer, we embed their logo into the first and last frame of the tutorial,” says Ceniti.

Typically, the tutorials are located on the hosting company’s Web site, either in the help desk area or the support and FAQ sections of the Web site. A method many companies are practicing is to include links to the tutorials in every new subscriber's ‘welcome e-mail’. “The key is not to hide the tutorials. The more you put them up front and visible, the more chance you have of your customers watching them and the more chance you have of reducing your support costs,” says Ceniti.

Customer feedback on the tutorial has been so strong that hosting companies are incorporating them as key components of their sales and marketing strategies. “There have been some hosts that have told us that the tutorials have been definite factors that sway potential customers to go with them…because they can see that the host is putting more attention into investing in the best support they can find,” observes Ceniti.

DemoDemo tutorials are designed for hosts of all shapes and sizes. “We have (customers) from big to small. We have the small one-man operation and we also have Rackshack, websellers.net and remarkablehosting.com,” says Ceniti. Currently, there are 370 different tutorials available, covering hosting topics all the way from A to Z. By the end of March 2003, Ceniti anticipates having close to 500 different tutorials and if you count the anticipated translations into Spanish and German, the number climbs to 1500.

But what it boils down to in the end is reducing overhead. “These tutorials are a very cost effective way for a Web host at whatever level to significantly reduce support costs…and show customers how to get the job done without having to submit a ticket,” emphasizes Ceniti. The response from the industry has been overwhelming. It’s almost as if they had been waiting for something like this to come along. “They were seemingly starved for something at an affordable level to help bring down support costs, and this seems to be doing the trick.”

So far, it sure looks that way.

Click here to read some testimonials about DemoDemo tutorials