Case Study Synopsis
In 2003 EIRCA Internet Solutions was becoming a widely respected and used provider of web hosting solutions. With a growing client base EIRCA soon realized the need for streamlining the support procedures to allow for more user initiated problem solving. EIRCA explored the fast-growing solution of movie based tutorials, which would allow a more streamlined support process and this brought them to DemoDemo.com.

With an ever changing industry, EIRCA relies on DemoDemo to keep their DemoCentre up to date with all the latest movie based tutorials so as to allow EIRCA's users to have a quick and easy solution to a large percentage of their stock questions.

Situation
The web hosting industry is one where stock questions are an every day occurrence. EIRCA's support staff were very aware that a solution was needed to the problem of frequently asked questions and problems.

Text based answers, while slightly effective, were simply not intuitive enough and left the user still needing to gain more assistance with the problem at hand, which would leave the user to input a support request via telephone or an email-based system. In the period of December 2003 through to July of 2004 EIRCA assisted customers with over 12000 new email support requests and approximately 1500 support-based phone calls. It was clear to the management team at EIRCA that many of the questions that their support staff faced on a daily basis were repeated on an almost hourly basis. The most extreme of these occurrences was the case of new clients and the inevitable questions that come from a new web hosting client. EIRCA was adding approximately 40-50 clients to their customer base each month and needed a way to streamline the process and cut their support requests down by at least 30-40% if they were to keep the same standard of customer service that their existing client base had become accustomed to.

Solution
Today, EIRCA uses more than 220 movie based tutorials by DemoDemo.com.

Centering their online support centre round the DemoDemo.com movie based tutorials, EIRCA has managed to cut their support request ratio down by approximately 55%. By making good use of the solution that DemoDemo offers, EIRCA integrated the tutorials in to a knowledgebase-like system using the Cerberus Helpdesk and email management system, allowing their customer base to always be within one click of the movie based tutorials, no matter where they are currently located on the support centre website.

By using good placement and integrating the movie based tutorials with a search function EIRCA's support centre now has the capability to automatically suggest a tutorial to their customer should the customer wish to gain assistance with a specific problem. New clients with EIRCA are presented with a simple four link menu inside of their welcome email, which outlines how the customer can have their website up and running within minutes without them even requiring the assistance of an EIRCA Internet Solutions employee.

Each new customer has the same check list when starting with a new hosting provider:

• Upload and publish their content to their new provider via an FTP program
• Create email accounts from within their control panel
• Create their personalized nameservers at their registrar
• Set their domain(s) to their newly created DNS servers

This three to four step process without the assistance of DemoDemo.com's movie based tutorials was resulting in an average of seven support requests per new customer in the new customers first 48 hours with EIRCA Internet Solutions. With the movie based tutorial solution presented to the new customer, EIRCA finds that this seven ticket average has been dramatically cut to an average of under two support requests per customer in their settling in period. EIRCA strictly monitors the use of their online support centre. They have found that since the introduction of the DemoDemo.com solution, the ratio of support requests to customers has decreased by almost 50%, allowing them to meet their goal of cutting support requests down by 30-40%.

In July of 2005, EIRCA had grown enough to maintain a client base that consisted of over thirty thousand domain names hosted. That was an increase of 14000 domains in the space of one year. With a client base that had doubled in a year, EIRCA found that the number of new support requests from January of 2005 to July of 2005 was 13,128. Their client base had doubled but the number of new customer support requests per six month period had stayed almost the same. The DemoDemo.com movie based tutorials had a hit count of over 200,000 in the period between January 2005 and July of 2005, presenting EIRCA with the exact solution they required.

Keeping content fresh
The Internet is an ever-changing place and this is most evident in the web hosting industry. Control Panel systems change and update on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, which means that content must be updated and kept fresh. Customers demand that content is always relevant to the system they are working with. EIRCA, thanks to DemoDemo.com's movie based tutorials, can keep their movie based tutorials relevant and keep the customer happy by always presenting a solution to any problem the customer may have.

Simon O'Rourke, CEO of EIRCA Internet Solutions, explains that "One of our main concerns when contemplating the movie based tutorial solution was that the movies must always be up to date. We clearly needed to make the right choice when choosing a provider for our movies, so that we could maintain our customer service levels. We chose the dominant company in the market for our solution and have never looked back or been disappointed."