Everyone claims "award-winning 24/7 support." You discover the truth at 2 AM when your checkout is down. Here's how to evaluate support quality BEFORE you need it.
Test before you buy
- Pre-sale question test: ask something slightly technical ("how do you handle PHP memory limits?"). Quality of that answer predicts post-sale support
- Response-time test: open a ticket at 9 PM on a weekday. Time the first response
- Channel check: is "24/7" a chatbot, or humans? Ask who handles level-2 issues and how they're reached
Red flags in support contracts
- 24/7 support = 24/7 chatbot + ticket queue answered "within 48h"
- No escalation path documented
- Support outsources to a third party that can't access your actual account state
- "Premium support" sold as an add-on — meaning base support is deliberately slow
What good looks like in 2026
Median first response under 2 hours on normal tickets, under 1 hour on critical. Staff with real access and real authority — not script-readers. Public status page and honest incident postmortems.
Our own standard
RoboHost publishes response targets in the SLA (P1 ≤ 1 hour, 24/7) — because support quality should be a measurable commitment, not a slogan.