Nowadays, software support and maintenance services are very popular in the IT market. Moreover, according to the forecast, it’s gonna continue developing in the near future.
To prove our statement, you can take a look at the statistics from Grand View Research below.

As the topic is relevant, we’d like to explain all the basic info that could be useful to know for companies using software, applications, or programs in their business operations.

In this article, we’ll explain the following items.

• What is application support?
• The stages of technical support and software maintenance.
• Technical support structure by levels.
• The maintenance of software products and its types.
• Why can companies need software technical support services? Business Benefits.
• Benefits in practice: a case study with 24/7 support.
• When is it appropriate for a company to contact an IT vendor?
• What guarantees the quality of the supplier’s services?

Let’s figure everything out step-by-step. 😉 

What is application support?

Application support services involve setting up, maintaining, adapting, and/or modifying the software, or eliminating errors found in it.

Besides, technical support services include providing updates to programs and additional modules for them.

Of course, that’s not a complete list of services. In the case of software maintenance, the list can be much longer. The scope of services for a certain company depends on individual requirements. Moreover, as any application is both a program and software, app support services are the same as software support ones.

If you’d like to get advice on technical support services for a specific program or company software, feel free to contact us. We’re always glad to answer your questions.

Most often, companies need qualified support and maintenance of programs when it’s necessary to optimize business processes, namely: stabilization of the functioning of programs and their improvement.

The provision of software support and maintenance services includes a number of stages.

More details about them are below.

The stages of technical support and software maintenance

The stages differ depending on the goals and, as a result, on the type of technical support.

1. Stages of operational support

• collection of full information about the detected problem;
• work with errors and restore the functionality of programs;
• software analysis in order to localize failure cases;
• advising the user on the configuration of the product and the rational use of its tools;
• cooperation with third-party software vendors that provide technical support for their own programs.

2. Stages of engineering support

• detailed analysis of existing problems and/or errors;
• providing temporary solutions for sudden program failure situations;
• diagnosing problems in order to identify their causes;
• cooperation with IT vendors that provide technical support for their programs.

3. Software management steps

• transfer of software for technical support;
• support and maintenance of the software product.

The examples of the 2nd stage are the following actions:

✔️ software adaptation to changes in documentation (regulatory acts),

✔️ expanding the set of program functions,

✔️ update to the latest versions,

✔️ analysis and elimination of the causes of program failures.

Software management services may also include the development of supporting solutions if required.

Also, not everyone understands what the support structure looks like and what each of its levels includes. This is understandable because the levels of technical support and their number may vary in different situations. So now let’s briefly talk about the basics of them.

Technical support structure by levels

Level-1 support is usually the “initial funnel” that reduces the number of errors, failures, or problems, resolves and cuts off the simplest ones, and creates tasks for other levels of technical support when necessary.

As far as program support and maintenance services are concerned, they usually include the 2nd and 3rd levels of business program support.

Level 2 is about resolving requests and detecting possible failures and problems.

Level 3 involves finding and analyzing the sources of problems, as well as changing programs, fixing errors, testing, and maintaining documentation.

Sometimes they allocate the 4th level of support. Here, the problems are taken outside the organization. Most often, these are questions about software or hardware.

We have dealt with the basics of software technical support services. In this block, we’ve mentioned software maintenance. As a rule, this is a service of the 2nd level of support. Next – about what exactly it is.

The maintenance of software products and its types

This service is relevant when it becomes necessary to make changes to the software product and documentation. This need may arise in case of detected failures or in order to upgrade or adapt the software.

The software maintenance process implies migration. That’s the transfer of the program to another environment. The whole process ends when the product is decommissioned.

What does the follow-up process look like?

1. Carrying out preparatory work.
2. Analysis of problems and requirements for program modification.
3. Performing software modifications.
4. Checking and acceptance of work performed.
5. Migration – software transfer.
6. Decommissioning the program.

Maintenance of the software product involves the elimination of defects, optimization, and improvement after the transfer of the software into operation.

Types of software maintenance

In the realities of the present time, the delivery of software from the 1st submission is unlikely. As a rule, minimal adjustment is required. A little less often – its adaptation and modernization. Hence the need for technical support services.

So, what types of software maintenance can be distinguished?

1) Accompanying bug fixes

Bugs occur sooner or later in any software, and fixing them quickly will help maintain business continuity and user loyalty.

2) Support for adaptation of the program

Business is changing, new processes, products, promotions, etc. appear. – all this must be reflected in the work of the software used.

3) Accompanying adjusting functions

Such a service is relevant when the business has changed so much that the program needs deeper changes and architectural work.

Now let’s move on to more practical aspects. ☺️

After acquiring the necessary servers or implementing programs, many companies refuse maintenance services in order to save money. At first glance, this action is logical. If such savings are always justified and what benefits a company can get from technical support services of a third-party vendor, we analyze further.

Below are the benefits that a company can get from the technical support services of a third-party vendor.

Why can companies need software technical support services? Business Benefits

Suppliers offer support and maintenance services with the clear goal of making a profit. What are the benefits for the buyer?

1. Minimization of IT infrastructure downtime.

With support services from a professional provider, the availability of the customer’s infrastructure is increased by reducing sudden downtime: experts resolve issues with failures and restore the functioning of equipment and programs with minimal time costs.

2. Protection from financial losses.

To minimize risks, it is advisable to take into account and allocate funds for support services when forming the company’s budget. During the audit, the risks of software disruption are calculated, taking into account the funds spent on technical support services of a third-party team of professionals. Companies that manage their finances wisely believe that the less they invest in infrastructure maintenance, the more they risk their finances and name.

3. Protection against reputational risks.

In the long term, situations in which companies save money initially on support and maintenance of their programs lead to a loss of business confidence from customers or other partners. As a result, both share price and profits may decline.

Benefits in practice: a case study with 24/7 support

Company

The e-commerce agency offers a full range of services in the field of Internet marketing, website design, support, and e-commerce for small and medium-sized businesses in various fields. This company offers solutions for its clients, including strategies, implementation, support, and marketing programs. These solutions help increase conversion rates, minimize costs, and increase ROI.

If you are interested in e-commerce app development, we can suggest you check out one of our previous articles – “How to Сreate an E-Commerce App Like eBay: Tips and Trends”.

Situation

It is necessary to provide a quality level of support and service from the moment the website of the client company is launched. The priority task is the correct operation of the site.

The overall goal of the customer is to ensure the continuity of business processes and improve the efficiency and performance of numerous clients’ sites.

To explain in a little more detail, the e-commerce partners needed help to maintain several websites, including regular maintenance of existing servers on AWS and other hosts, and opening and configuring web servers (such as Elastic Cache, Sphinx, Varnish, etc.), availability to eliminate downtime and other issues. Troubleshooting and DevOps support services after hours, holidays, and weekends were critical for our client.

The solution from the Brivian team

To ensure business continuity and keep all customer websites running 24/7/365, the Brivian team implemented their 24/7 incident management and DevOps support solution, which included 100 incidents and 60 hours for DevOps tasks. The solution consisted of three stages, including:

• detection and planning,
• setup and transition
• current support.

Our team reviewed the client’s current AWS environments and ensured that target infrastructures and workloads were covered with monitoring tools (Zabbix, CloudWatch + Grafana for consolidated data visualization), making the solution flexible and cost-effective, and ensuring that alerts and incident management tools work as expected (using PagerDuty and Jira ServiceDesk) and all escalation rules were properly configured.

Our teams then launched 24/7/365 Tier 2 DevOps support with their engineers working in rotation to provide day-to-day infrastructure management, troubleshooting, and improvements within a 5-15 minute SLA, including non-business hours and holidays.

You can also look at our articles about DevOps:

• What Is DevOps and Why Does Your Business Need It?

• DevOps Project Management: How Has the DevOps Approach Changed the Way We Look at Project Management?

• DevOps Release Management: the Best Practices.

Result

With an effective solution implemented for e-commerce partners, our team was able to prevent up to 70% of all downtime incidents. In other cases, the incident investigation time was reduced from 60 to 10 minutes. Moreover, thanks to the Jira ServiceDesk setup, all tasks and incidents were resolved on time, without downtime for their clients’ websites. The customer’s infrastructure has become more secure and cost-effective, while running smoothly 24/7.

When is it appropriate for a company to contact an IT vendor?

Outsourcing technical support for many companies is a much more cost-effective option compared to the traditional scheme with a large support department. Helpdesk at a distance and several local system administrators in offices are cheaper. Cost savings are achieved due to the fact that technical support works only when necessary, i.e. no need to pay for downtime of the team. In addition, the efficiency of work is guaranteed by concluding a special agreement-contract.

In other words, it makes sense to contact a technical support provider when the cost of owning a dedicated team of specialists is higher.

What guarantees the quality of the supplier’s services?

By contacting the competent technical support team of the outsourcing company, a special SLA agreement is concluded between the parties.

All incoming tasks are solved in accordance with the agreed rules and regulations, which allows us to help the client with incidents in almost any case.

The terms for which assistance must be provided are prescribed in the rules of work, where the priorities of the customer company are set.

Thus, you can be sure that a solution will be found within a limited and clearly defined time.

That means prescribing all the key aspects in the agreement will help both compare the work performed with the tasks set and secure the customer company from the legal side.

Instead of a conclusion

Any software requires maintenance and technical support.

This can be compared to cleaning an apartment: even after a perfect renovation, you need to wash the floors, vacuum, and dust. If this is not done, then the ideal repair will quickly deteriorate, and if done, it will last a long time and will please the eye.

It is the same with software: when it is properly maintained and maintained; the company receives a high-quality and durable operation of programs and systems.

The specialists of our team have the experience and knowledge to provide support for your company’s software product as soon as possible.

You have the opportunity to choose the form of cooperation independently, according to which software support and maintenance will be carried out. Also, the level of control over the implementation of the software support and maintenance project depends on your wishes and preferences.

Our use of a process approach in our work guarantees the quality of the results of the services provided.

Contact us to get our answers to the questions you have.