No need to be afraid to bring out a simple product with a minimum of functionality. Workflow on applications should be in the form of constant progress in short repeats and with well-organized response. Otherwise stated, you can add more capabilities to your application after a while. As for a decision to find an application maintenance and support company, it deserves more attention. Let’s have a little talk about it!
The necessity of application maintenance and support
One of the main specializations of the Weelorum company is the development of applications for varied projects, their maintenance, and support. And this is quite an important kind of assistance. On the one hand, their clients may have customer service departments that handle the first wave of user questions and complaints. Contrarily, the support of such applications requires an increased level of service provision, which is tied to the level of service of the customer company.
Usually, the chief tasks of application maintenance and support company are:
- health monitoring;
- receiving feedback from the end users of the product and assisting in solving their problems;
- improving performance and adding new cool features;
- adjustment of the application for new gadgets and software editions;
- enhancement of the product progress scheme.
Work scheme on maintenance and support of applications
All work on the support and development of applications is often conducted following the next steps:
- Incident and problem management
- Change management
- Release management
- Service delivery management
- Audience management
- Business value management
Release management
Formally, the result of our work is the release of a new release, so the release management process can be considered central to the overall scheme. It consists of the following successive steps:
- release planning;
- release completion;
- release itself.
Release-building work follows the Agile methodology and is packaged into one or more sprints. Jira is used as an issue tracker in most modern IT companies.
The quality of a release is measured by user feedback, as well as by the deviation of the number of crash reports from the background.
Incident and problem management
The goal of this type of management is to timely resolve problems exposed within the performance of the application.
An incident is any event that is not part of the standard (regular) use case, which led to the partial or complete inability to use the application.
The work in this process is built according to the classical three-level scheme:
First level
The online service is a single point of entry for calls. Carries out registration and classification of applications, determining their priority, and those responsible for the execution, are responsible for resolving typical incidents.
As we mentioned at the beginning, this level of support is put into the hands of the customer service department on the customer side. We recommend providing operational service specialists with the necessary documents and instructions and helping build the process of interaction with the second level.
Second level
Support engineers conduct technical due diligence and solve non-standard incidents, are responsible for updating the knowledge base about the application, identify defects and transfer them to the third level of support. This level also administers middleware if it is used.
Third level
Developers and testers analyze problems that are not solved at the second level, eliminate shortcomings and test innovative solutions.
Audience management
As part of this process, you can directly interact with the end users of the application:
- monitor user feedback to detect missed defects, as well as adjust the product development plan;
- answer questions about the functionality of the product (unfortunately, this feature is only available on Google Play);
- inform about release plans, filter inappropriate comments and upvote those that are relevant.
It is almost impossible to work with negative reviews in app stores. They often include no feedback and really valuable information. Therefore, we encourage users to report problems to the support team through the feedback form. It can be found on the “About the Application” screen, which is standard for our projects, or opened at the time of evaluation in case the user wants to slap a deuce or one.
Together with saving the rating, using the feedback form, you can collect the information necessary for analysis, such as the type of device, version and OS used, and much more.
Business value management
The most important process in terms of product development. Its goal is to plan product changes to achieve key indicators set by the business. In the best of cases, they watch the count of users in Google Analytics.
Decisions to change the design and functionality of the product in such situations are made on a whim and are not substantiated by anything. Meanwhile, to constantly improve the quality of a product, it is vital to calculate and analyze key metrics that are synchronized with business goals.
The process is based on the collection and analysis of metrics at each stage of the conversion funnel. As part of the process, you can do the next:
- set up tracking and analytics;
- systems funnel design within the application to evaluate the achievement of specific business goals;
- visualization of the dynamics of changes in metrics analytics consulting (what is good and what is bad for business in terms of metrics);
- measures to improve metrics by providing analytics from the strongest players.
Service delivery management
The target of this so-called method is to enable conformity with the SLA and make the support services themselves better.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a document that describes the services provided as part of the support, as well as measurable quality indicators, such as:
- application response time;
- time to resolve incidents and defects depending on the degree of their criticality and impact on business processes.
Final thoughts
It is really important to know how to build a support system for your products. Without it, you will not be able to work on more or less large projects. As well, if you are not skilled in application maintenance and support, do not hesitate to ask for the help of experts. Weelorum is always ready to assist you in achieving the highest goals.
