Reseller Hosting: Handling Support Requests with cPanel/WHM

If you’re going to be a web hosting reseller, one thing is sure: you’re going to have support requests. And unless you provide some good customer support, you will lose your clients.

Part of offering customer support is to have a good helpdesk. A helpdesk is a system (either a software or a web-based application) that will allow you to manage your contacts and support requests. Customers should be able to follow up on their support tickets and receive updates. On your end, you should be able to manage priorities and answer your customers.

There are a lot of helpdesk systems (or also known as Customer Relationship Management / CRM softwares) out there. Some can adapt to various types of enterprise while others are specifically developed for a particular market.

But before you go out and spend money on the first Helpdesk/CRM software you find, there might be some alternatives you want to try out first. There are some good free helpdesk applications available but today we’re going to look into one that’s made available with the world’s most popular control panel, cPanel (view all cPanel Hosting Companies).

cPanel / WHM (Web Host Manager) has a basic support request system integrated. Now don’t get me wrong, this is not really a helpdesk system but if you got just a few customers, this can be a quick way to handle support requests with no financial investment. In fact, what it does is that it allows your customers to submit support requests from their cPanel control panel. Some additional informations are then sent to your email address along with the support ticket detail.

Now you simply need to check the information that you want to be inserted automatically into the email.

Enabling Support Requests with WHM

The first thing you’ll need to do is to enable support request submission. Start by logging in WHM (http://www.yourwebsite.com:2086) with your reseller hosting account. Next click on Configure Support Request Submission from the left column menu (click to enlarge screenshot).

Enter the email address you want the support requests to be sent to and simply check the optional information you want to be included automatically when a customer submits a support request. It can be useful to get these information since most customers forget to mention this type of details.

Submitting a Support Request with cPanel

Now log into cPanel (http://www.yourwebsite.com:2082) with a website hosting account and click on the Submit a Support Request icon. On the next page, you will be brought with what basically looks like a standard email form.

Just fill in the form and hit the Send button. You should now receive an email at the address you’ve configured previously in WHM along with information such as the customer’s username, domain name, IP address, etc.

Alternatives

Like I’ve said, this is a very basic system and it’s just a starting point. There are a lot of good CRM / Helpdesk softwares available for free such as Help Center Live, osTicket and HelpCenter Live which features live chat support, but that’s for another post.

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Links

• Reseller Hosting Directory
• cPanel Hosting Directory