Ongoing Support and Maintenance

THE VISION

As a Product Owner, expect that the audience receives great service interacting with your product or customer service teams. You want to be sure the interactions are positive and never caused by technical challenges. What’s more, you would love to partner with the support team who can summarise the audience feedback to inform product development decisions.

As a Chief Technology Officer, you want reliable maintenance of the product infrastructure and functionality proactive monitoring.

As a Chief Operating Officer, you expect the technology aspect of the products, both infrastructure and software, to be monitored proactively, to minimise operational downtime, so that your team can focus on improving customer experience.

THE CHALLENGE

As a person responsible for the long-term success of your company, some of these considerations are undoubtedly on top of your mind:

Identifying and addressing issues before they become critical leads to happier and more satisfied customers. Inadequate understanding of the reasons behind system slowdowns, for example, can lead to customer frustration and churn. Properly organised support teams can gather the necessary data to pinpoint and address these issues proactively.

Collecting and analysing customer feedback and issues delivers valuable insights into what your customers want and need. This information can guide your product development efforts.

Proactive product maintenance can prevent larger and more expensive problems down the road. Regular system updates and monitoring can help avoid costly downtime and security breaches.

Gathering and analysing data from customer support interactions can help your business make informed decisions. You can identify trends and patterns, optimise your processes, and focus resources on the areas that matter most to your customers.

Providing developers and technical specialists with data and insights about system performance and customer needs can be a game-changer. For example, payment failures or uncovering where users frequently abandon transactions in their journey is essential for optimising the user experience. A support team with the right approach can gather valuable insights to improve these critical touchpoints.

Collecting and analyzing infrastructure and application data is crucial to gather and analyze data regarding the state of your infrastructure and applications. This includes monitoring server logs, application performance metrics, and other relevant data points. By doing so, you can gain insights into the health and performance of your systems, enabling proactive identification of potential issues before they escalate.

Setting automatic triggers prevents critical situations. They trigger before the situation reaches a critical level. These event response can range from alerting operators to initiating dynamic scaling of resources within budget constraints. By anticipating problems before they become critical, you can minimise downtime and ensure uninterrupted service to your customers.

Pros and Cons

The responsibility for the outsourced support department lies with the supplier, with defined performance indicators. The commercial model could be linked to performance. However, the downsides include a lack of ownership, high personnel turnover, and a lack of connection with the product strategy unless you devote effort.
Regarding the support function as an extension of your team, the benefits include retention and a bidirectional flow of knowledge between the product and support team. User feedback influences the product roadmap more swiftly, and the tech team can reinforce support. However, the downside is the necessity to invest time in maintaining healthy working relationships with support.
Another option is to build and maintain an in-house IT team responsible for handling all technology-related matters. This team manages everything from troubleshooting to infrastructure upgrades. Though it means high costs associated with hiring, training, and maintaining an IT team.
Ad-hoc IT services involve hiring external experts on an as-needed basis. Instead of ongoing contracts, you engage IT specialists for specific projects or issues. This offers flexibility to access specialised expertise, but it lacks consistency in support, potentially leading to coverage gaps. Response times for urgent issues may be longer than ongoing support, and proactive monitoring and optimisation of technology infrastructure are limited. This approach may not include ongoing assessments or preventive measures for optimal system performance.

COMPUTOOLS APPROACH TO ONGOING SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE

Computools provides expert care for sustained excellence in our clients’ digital solutions.

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COMPUTOOLS OFFER

Our offer is built on the belief that only by working together the product, technology and support teams can deliver optimal experiences to the product users. So, our model is based on a collaborative approach that focuses on:

01.

Computools employs performance monitoring tools and strategies to ensure your systems run smoothly. For instance, when an online gaming company experienced intermittent performance issues, Computools implemented real-time performance monitoring, identified and optimised system resources for seamless gameplay.

02.

Computools provides round-the-clock technical support, ensuring you have assistance whenever needed. For example, when a global e-learning platform faced server downtime during an international exam, the support team promptly diagnosed the issue, restored the server's operation, recovered all lost data, implemented load balancing to handle high traffic, set up monitoring and alerting systems for early issue detection, and planned for scalability to prevent future downtime, ensuring the continuity of services during critical events like international exams.

03.

Our team regularly monitors systems' health for anomalies and applies preventive measures. When an e-commerce platform detected unusual traffic patterns, Computools identified a potential DDoS attack and implemented countermeasures to protect the platform's availability.

04.

By conducting thorough security audits and implementing robust security measures, we protect your sensitive data. For instance, when a healthcare provider sought to enhance data security and compliance, we implemented encryption and access controls, safeguarding patient information.

05.

We offer continuous feature enhancements and upgrades. For instance, when a fintech startup wanted to introduce new payment options, we integrated these features, enhancing the user experience and expanding revenue streams.

06.

To keep your technology stack current, we regularly monitor and evaluate your existing technologies, research and adopt new technologies that are relevant to your business needs. For example, a company that sells online courses uses a learning management system to deliver its courses to students. It needed to keep its LMS up-to-date with the latest features and security patches to provide the best possible experience for its students. However, the company did not have the internal expertise to manage and maintain its LMS independently. Therefore, we identified and implemented new LMS features that can improve the student experience, applied security patches to the LMS to protect it from vulnerabilities, and troubleshot problems that occurred with the LMS.

07.

Computools promptly identifies and addresses software bugs and issues. For example, when a critical bug disrupted the operations of a retail e-commerce platform, Computools swiftly identified the root cause and resolved the issue, minimising downtime and revenue loss.