We've recently unveiled our new support policies here at ComponentArt, and I
thought I'd take some time to explain how this came to be, and what it means for
us and our customers.
The biggest changes in the new system are
the introduction of Support Types, limiting the number of incidents a user can
open per license, and purchasable support. The origin of all of these changes
are the same; for years we offered free, unlimited support to all users and, as
our user base has grown, we've found it increasingly difficult to keep our
commitments to both timeliness and quality as the number of incidents increased.
Because our support was free, we would have occasions when a user would strain
resources by submitting multiple incidents, far more than the average customer.
At the same time, we've had numerous users contact us wanting to purchase
escalated support- that is, for example, a subscriber who did not necessarily
want to purchase an enterprise license, but did want to escalate their issue to
be treated with enterprise level support. Our old system did not accommodate
that.
To remedy these issues we introduced incident caps per license and varying types of support based on the type of license
owned, with other support types purchasable if the user wished. I should point
out that when purchasing licenses, our customers are automatically granted
requests with their purchase- there is no need to buy support unless the support
associated with your license has been entirely used. For the record, the
incidents per license type are as follows:
| License
Type |
Incident Count |
| Free
Trial |
3 Standard
Incidents |
| Developer License |
6 Standard Incidents |
| Subscription License |
10 Priority Incidents |
| Enterprise License |
Unlimited Rapid
Incidents |
In
other words, when you buy a Web.UI Subscription, you are automatically granted
10 priority incidents. These numbers are reset when a subscription
renewal is purchased, so in essence, it's 10 priority requests per year for
subscribers, and ongoing unlimited for enterprise licenses. As well, any user
can escalate their issue by purchasing support; a user who has a developer
license now has access to a higher level of support if they so chose. In regards
to those numbers themselves, we were extremely careful in choosing them. The
goal was to impact as little of our customer base as possible, and I'm confident
we achieved that. By our estimation the number of users who ever exceeded those
numbers we selected was in the area of 3 to 5% - in essence, the vast minority
of our customers. As well, has Hwan pointed out, bugs are not considered support incidents; any request found to be a problem on our end is refunded to the user.
Feature requests would be the same, and refunded as well.
So far I'm pleased
with the results- we've been able to provide increased support levels and to our
customers, improve the quality of our responses, and have been able to
accommodate users that wished to escalate support beyond their license type. We've also been able to introduce another support option, the Premium Support Contract. This latter type has proven invaluable by customers with complex implementations, as we are able to conduct screen sharing sessions and help debug and optimize their code, which isn't a level of support we could have reasonably offered under our old system. As
a result of the changes, too, we've seen less strain our resources, and have
been able to increase our offerings in other areas- staff participation in our
(always free) forums has increased, and we're working on improving our resources
for our users (work on expanding our client documentation is currently underway,
for example).
So there you have it- ComponentArt Support 2.0 and how it came to
be. Of course, while we're happy with the intial results none of this is written
in stone. We're always listening to our users and looking to improve, so if
anyone has any suggestions, just let us know- we're all ears (and no, it
wouldn't count as a support request :)).
