Consider Pro-active Maintenance
By Jan Verlaan on Tuesday 16 August 2011, 12:10 - Maintenance Policies - Permalink
When you receive support issues that turn out to be defects you could decide to only solve it at the customer site. It is cheap for the short term. What happens when the customer upgrades to a newer version or service pack depends on your amount of pro-active maintenance!
When there is no pro-active maintenance in place the customer will run in to the same error again after upgrade. That will definitely harm your customer's level of satisfaction.Pro-active maintenance is wise when you have several (newer) versions of the product. Know errors will not return and your product will improve.
Customers could run into the same error easily. There is always a customer who reports it first. The solution made, could be made available for all other customers to down load it as well, also for those who are using newer versions.
Pro-active working can be done two ways. One way is to adjust all outstanding versions. Another way is to adjust the version of the customer and higher versions. The latter is economically more interesting. Provide a scheme to Support and Maintenance so it becomes clear which versions will be maintained an which will not. Of course you have to inform your customers upfront about this maintenance policy.
Higher Service Level
When you have several versions of a product pro-active maintenance could help you improve your service level.
An error found in version B, could also occur in version A (pre-decessor of version B) or C (successor of version B). When solving the error in the two other versions as well without a customer complaining about is, is pro-active maintenance.
As soon as a customer logs the issue on one of the two other versions you have the solution immediately available. Via the Self-Service functions the customer could easily find the solution himself without disturbing Support.
You have to decide if your approach will be re-active or pro-active. Re-active is cheaper for the short term but in the long term Pro-active maintenance is cheaper and increases your service level.