SUPPORT & MAINTENANCE

What is Support & Maintenance?

Both support and maintenance are essential for the success of any creative campaign or project. 

So it helps to know exactly what’s meant by ‘support’ and ‘maintenance’ before you begin.

Support

This is ad-hoc reactive work that keeps the digital platform going in the face of ‘breaking bugs’ (like something that stops people buying products on your ecommerce site at 2am). Our support agreements typically come with an SLA (service-level agreement) defining how quickly we’ll respond. Once we’ve reacted to your support request, there are often further, resultant tasks that will need scheduling into the maintenance work plan after the support ticket has closed.

Maintenance

This is scheduled work required to fix ‘non-breaking bugs’ – non-urgent, but nonetheless requiring attention – and to add new features. Unlike support work, maintenance releases are planned and scheduled.

Clients usually ask for a combination of support and maintenance, and the services often get bundled together – hence why there’s often some confusion between the terms.

Agencies sometimes charge an hourly rate for doing any ongoing work. But this is a bad idea. Here’s why:

• Scheduling. If there’s one thing agency developers hate, it’s being pulled off an exciting new project to work on an older project using last season’s technology. They get frustrated, and, soon enough, they leave. There’s also the loss of time resulting from switching between projects.

• Resources. Specifically, a lack of allowance for hardware/software resources required for performing the service. Agencies don’t always understand that they need a ready development, testing, staging and production environment for each project they maintain. So, for a whole bunch of projects, that’s a ready set of environments – not one developer’s laptop. Inevitably, there’s a cost to running these, and typically it’s tempting for agencies to cut back so these environments aren’t available.

Short of building your own support and maintenance department from the ground up, we can help.

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What we offers

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InlineTech provides a unique maintenance and support service that ensures fast response and quick resolution of IT infrastructure problems. It’s unique because it can give you definitive answers when you need them most—in times of trouble. Anyone can promise that their engineers and support staff will be there when you need them, whereas InlineTech has strict support procedures that document and guarantee resolution.

The primary goal of our services is to keep critical systems stable and available. We offer a number of support options that are designed to quickly resolve problems and restore systems should they fail. InlineTech’s support services include:

 

Telephone support

Our technical support staffs address questions and attempt to resolve problems for customers who call into our operations center.

 

Online support

With access to a customer’s network through a remote connection, our technical support staffs attempt to diagnose and resolve problems remotely.

 

Onsite support (Nationwide)

Technical support staffs are dispatched to a customer’s site to address problems that cannot be resolved remotely and may require replacement hardware and or software.

 

Standby support

Where ongoing technical support is necessary, staff availability can be guaranteed to customers over a predefined period of time.