For any entrepreneur(our client) considering purchasing a product or service, understanding the warranty, free support options, and maintenance plan details can be essential so its fair on both ends.
In this article, we'll explain in detail our warranties, what is included under free support(other than the warranty), what a maintenance plan is, and why this is necessary.
Warranties:
We have been committed to upholding our customers' rights for a considerable length of time. I'm referring to the service warranties during the development of any development efforts here.
Let us say you're using software (whether it be Brilliant Directories, SugarCRM, Magento, OpenCart, or WordPress) on which you'd like customization or development work to be performed. You hired a developer to get that one thing customized. Customizations are completed, and you're pleased. You didn't hire any other developer for the next two to three months, and you didn't make any further modifications. But the software itself updated, and your past customizations are not working as expected.
Practically, it's not the fault of the developer you hired. However, we at BusinessLabs thought of offering a 3months of warranties on anything we do to all our clients, subject to our client has not done any other customizations or got any thing done on the site by any other third party. Even if sometimes the 3-month period is over, we have offered free support as a gesture, subject to availability and feasibility.
What does this mean (an example): You got a suit stitched. Your fashion designer delivers to you, you use it and you loved it. In the next 2 to 3 months, you have gained weight, and now the suit doesn't fit the same as expected.
Do we go back to the designer and expect your designer to still offer free alterations? - Of course, we don't.
Hence, 99.50% of computer software development companies do not support such a warranty in practice.
But, BusinessLabs offers such free warranties.
That was all about what Warranties are. Now, let's delve into what Free Support is and why we built the support system in the first place.
Free Support
Free support here can be classified into either of these two things:
- Change requests during a project within reasonable limits.
For example, we did a project with a client (project worth less than $2500), and the client sent us a couple of tickets to make changes back and forth.
On the other hand, a client for whom we did a relatively bigger project(for example - value over $50k) will certainly need 10x more tickets compared to smaller projects.
Hence, we don't have any specified limits for any clients. Even a client with $500 in the project can raise support tickets, and a client with a million-dollar project can also have access to support tickets.
(We know that all our clients understand our situation that In a fixed-price project - we cannot take unlimited change requests.) - Post-development change requests (within 21 days or a reasonable timeframe).
To all our clients with a sizeable project size or critical projects - we offer them to send us such change requests.
For example, We are developing or designing a website, and after work is done, the client can send us new or revised content to replace with old content - however, if the client also approved 'old' content in the first place, we love to honour such change requests.
If the project size is reasonable (or manier times, we just love that client even if the project was too small but an interesting project or person to work with) to accommodate one more change request for the second time - we generally accept it and perform it.
We have done it 100s of times. We do it almost every day.
In order for us to offer such warranty or receive change requests - we have built a support system which everyone can access
via https://pmp.businesslabs.org
This support system helps us keep track of requests from all our clients, which clients can also refer back to anytime in future.
Since our clients have access to a support system, they can create support tickets for any matter.
For example: we didn't work on a particular thing, but a client can create a ticket on their own. And our developers pick up the tickets and try to solve them.
We never ask our developers to hold on to support even if that particular thing is not our fault or falls under our warranty.
However, Developers have their own KPIs where they are evaluated on their performance every month and every quarter.
Based on the statistics of 3890 tasks, 400+ big projects, and 5000+ tickets in the last 3 years - We know that 5% of the time, our developers have to work on tickets regards to warranties, and 10% of the time, they need to work on genuine free support which is within reasonable limits just to help that client in need even if is out of our scope. Hence, a developer is expected to perform 110 billed work, 20 hours towards internal training and meetings and the rest 30 unbilled work against warranties and free support, which makes their total 160 monthly hours.
We started falling in 2021 when we could not appraise many of our sincere team members in 2021.
We got into the root of the matter, and we realized there were about 3000 support tickets which were not under our scope of work, and 80% of those tickets were never converted to a paid task, but out of passion, the developers picked it and completed, with trust that clients would have paid for such task.
WE WILL NEVER EVER LET OUR DEVELOPERS STOP SERVING CLIENTS. PERIOD. That is the philosophy we wish to live with.
Here is a situation:
When a customer creates a support ticket, the team first has to read and understand the ticket, sometimes discuss internally the best way to address the issue, and then make the correction or correct settings in the website. This takes an average of 30 minutes per ticket (minimum of averages).
Sometimes it looks like this: Reading a ticket for 3 minutes, understanding it for another 3 minutes, making the quick fix in 10 minutes, checking quickly other parts of the website to see whether it is working as expected even after the change - 10 minutes, thinking about what to rely on the ticket 2 minutes, writing the reply 2minutes, updating notes in the ticket 2minutes. Total time spent: 30 minutes if all goes well.
Sometimes a simple ticket can take 2 to 3 hours; we never know.
Sometimes even a ticket that only took 30 minutes initially can lead to more tickets due to a problem which was not tested for lack of time, and such future tickets will add 10x more time to it.
In all, sometimes it made us feel that what the rest, 99.50% of the companies do by not offering free support but charging clients for every single minute spent on work is the way forward. But, we are so passionate about software development and helping entrepreneurs we would love to stick with our philosophy of helping clients as best we can.
To address the situation with a win-win approach, we launched Maintenance plans.
Maintenance plans.
You can read about maintenance plans here: https://bdgrowthsuite.com/maintenance.
We have three types of maintenance plans. But let me explain one MAIN BENEFIT of this.
Let's say you have picked up the costliest plan as of today, which is $299/mo per site.
For $299, you will never get a developer working for one whole day or two days in practice, but you get peace of mind for a whole month.
Let me explain to you using an example:
How you might be operating, in general, today without a maintenance plan:
First, if your website gets an issue, you will contact the support of the software company(BD or Opencart or Magento), and in 24 hours, they let you know the steps.
Second, You will check their email response in a few hours and follow the instructions.
Third, you feel you still need help, and You contact your developer and wait for them to reply; they reply to you with a quote, a few hours from when you see their email and respond back with a yes.
Fourth, your developer then sends you an invoice and completes the work.
On average, one small thing takes 5 days to execute.
Now, let's compare this with our maintenance plans:
In the maintenance plan that we offer - if you send a ticket, and if it's a quick thing - we will only get back to you with the sentence 'It's done, please check."
You saved your 5 days. 5 x 24hours = 120hours.
If you are an entrepreneur, your hourly rate is $500. We tried to save you $6000 in worth your precious time in just one such quick fix-related ticket. For this, you just paid $299 for the month. 20x of ROI. 200% returns. Every month. Simple.
Whatever else is advertised or listed in the plan - is all bonus, you use it, or you ignore it.
But our team will certainly do all that is advertised every month, without fail. We will never ignore it.
So, with the maintenance plan, we are solving these two issues:
- This maintenance plan helps our developers stay motivated to solve a support ticket since a ticket is coming from a maintenance plan client and will add up to their performance.
- The maintenance plan helps our clients where a client doesn't have to waste their time worth a few thousand dollars in the whole process, from requesting an estimate to invoice before that simplest thing is taken care of.
Please note: We do also have a fair usage policy in the maintenance plan. Certainly, we can't take unlimited (hundreds of tickets) in any of the plans. But these maintenance plans are only for lightweight client needs.
We have detailed it here: https://bdgrowthsuite.com/maintenance (Please read it entirely, including the section titled as "What do we mean by Fair Usage Policy?" and the FAQs.)
Finally, to answer the rarest of the clients who informed us that they don't worry about the performance metrics of our developers:
If developers are not appraised properly, they will leave, and in turn, none of our rest developers will be willing to take on your next project. You will then be hiring any other development company (the rest, 99.50% of dev agencies, will never offer you even the warranties, forget the support.)
We humbly request you support us with a maintenance plan upgrade, so we can keep supporting you.
(Again, note: If you have created a support ticket (for a quick fix but not customization) and such a couple of tickets in a year, we will never bother you to consider upgrading to a maintenance plan. If in case we tell you about it, it is just for general awareness that we have something that might interest you.)
Looking forward to keeping serving you in your best interest.