Support Policy Changes

Stephen — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:22:00 GMT

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 :)).

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hello, world.

Stephen — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:30:00 GMT

Seeing as how this is my first post I figured I'd introduce myself. I'm the Manager of Developer Support at ComponentArt. I've been with the company since nearly the beginning and it's been a great ride. I've been a professional developer for about 8 years now and have done a bit of everything, from perl and cgi scripting to php to vb to jsp to classic asp, all the way to where we are now with asp.net 2.0 and ajax. I'm originally from Halifax and I'm what you might call a huge nerd- my interests are comic books, videogames and technoogy in general. In my spare time I like to draw and write and spend time fixing my house or with my wife, Jen, and dog, Krypto (see? huge nerd- and 10 nerd points if you get the reference). Oh, and I'm learning how to play guitar- wish me luck.

I'll be dropping by now and again to share my thoughts on whatever strikes my fancy, industry related or not. And if you ever want to talk comics, I'm your man.

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Stephen Hatcher

Support Policy Changes

hello, world.