If you run an online website or business, you risk downtime at any hour of the day. This event may severely impact your business in more ways than one. Find out what your business needs for complete stability and peace of mind around the year, especially during the holiday season.
So, you have a website or an ecommerce store. Much like a baby, you’re thinking of its safety and welfare all the time. You wake up at night wondering if your site has crashed. There is never a moment when you’re at peace. You belong in the same boat as millions of website owners who are concerned about the welfare of their websites, around the clock.
Websites are fragile digital assets. Much like an expensive car or an exquisite wristwatch, they are prone to issues. Technologically, there could be a thousand reasons why your site might go down suddenly. It could be a server-related issue, a hack, a technical glitch or even something that you were hardly prepared for. As an online website owner with a reputation to keep, you must ensure that you take the necessary precautions for the smooth running of your precious baby — your website. And that’s precisely where Application Support comes in.
What is Application Support (and why haven’t I ever heard of it)?
Let’s say your ecommerce website is built on an ecommerce platform like Shopify or Magento. Or let’s say you own a content management system (CMS)-based website on WordPress or Progress Sitefinity. It’s all going fine. End users love your website. And then one day, disaster strikes! Your website faces severe downtime and isn’t available for end users anymore — and the worst thing of all — you don’t know how long this situation will last!
What you need at this point is an application support team that understands the application (Shopify, Magento, etc.) your website is built on. The team typically analyses the underlying issue and fixes it to get your website up and running again. Voila!
In the simplest words, Application Support is a service that ensures a business’s digital assets run smoothly and enable employees, users, clients, and customers to complete their target tasks without any trouble. Application support is often confused with hosting support and website maintenance, but it’s a unique solution that deserves its own place in the world of technology.
Application Support can be further categorised under two different types:
A) Technical Support and B) Human Support
Technical Support
Technical support is the support of digital assets such as web apps, mobile apps, websites, software, and technological systems. Technical support is essential to the longevity and health of your website. Websites, apps, and other software services always have bugs, service issues, security flaws, and other technical issues. No software solution is perfect, and without ongoing app support, the normal technical issues that arise will cause larger problems or create a negative user experience and drive your users away.
Human Support
Human support is an aspect of Application Support that is often overlooked. While technical support focuses on software issues, there will be times when a user is confused and requires human guidance. In addition, good support can help your company retain users who might otherwise abandon your application after a frustrating experience.
How Application Support works in real-life
Application support can be easily availed from a trusted local technology partner who will provide you support for a fixed retainer fee determined by the complexity of the application. This ongoing application support ensures that the stability of the application is actively monitored and managed in a way that minimises the risk of downtime. It also represents a commitment from the technology company that in the event the application does experience downtime, the issues can be investigated and resolved at the earliest.
What Services are typically covered under Application Support?
Local Environment
The technology partner you sign up with will maintain an internal local development environment containing a replica of your application. This will be used for the purpose of performing offline development or remedial work on the application.
Staging Environment
Your technology partner will maintain a secure staging environment to allow work requests for the application to be previewed by you prior to going live with any changes in your application.
Source Files Management
Your technology partner will manage the source files associated with the application to ensure a seamless process of managing the local development, staging and live web environments to prevent loss of website functionality.
Keeping Backup of Source Code
Your technology partner will manage the backup and take responsibility for the source code for the application, ensuring that a secure backup of all source files is maintained at all times.
Dedicated Application Support Engineer
Your technology partner will ensure sufficient resource and knowledge remains available within its team to perform application support activities and undertake any technical interaction with third-party systems connected in some way to the application.
Quick & Responsive Turnaround
Your technology partner agrees to resolve any issues that prevent the application from functioning in the required way during normal operations in a prompt and efficient manner once they have been reported by you.
Different Types of Support
Round-the-clock Support
This type of support ensures you are always covered, irrespective of the time of day. Availing of this package ensures your website will, in all probability, be up and running even if there happens to be an outage in the middle of the night.
Fixed-Hours Support
In this type of support, you can determine the hours that are most critical for your website and accordingly get support from your technology partner only during these hours. This support model is good for businesses that experience peak-hour activities.
Ad-Hoc Support
Unlike round-the-clock or fixed-hours support, ad-hoc support only provides support when you need it most. Your technology partner will provide you with a hotline that ensures you can reach out to them when you need support most.
5 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Application Support
In essence, the benefits of application support are incomparable for any website. It’s a must-have and a very integral part of your application. Here are some immediate and tangible benefits of signing up for application support with a reputed technology partner:
Complete Peace of Mind
Imagine not having to worry about your website crashing, even in the middle of the night. Imagine not having to worry about downtime while celebrating Christmas with your family. Application support ensures that someone has got your back all the time. As a result, the peace of mind you get is worth its weight in gold.
Seamless Business Revenue Generation
No downtime means no loss of business opportunities or revenues. This is especially true for ecommerce business owners who literally depend on their websites to make sales. Even a minute’s downtime can impact business revenues by millions.
Technical Accountability
When you sign up with a trusted technical partner, they take complete responsibility for providing application support and fixing the underlying issues at the soonest. You no longer need to run from pillar to post, from one vendor to another, to get your application issues resolved.
Specialised Technical Expertise
An experienced technology partner comes with years of application support expertise and knowledge. Equipped with a team that has worked on multiple similar issues in the past, the technology partner can fix application-related issues in the quickest possible time, thus saving your revenues and your reputation.
Reduced Spending
Outsourcing your application support to an external technology partner is always less expensive compared to having an in-house application support team. An established technology partner offers various flexible engagement and payment models to make application support a highly affordable experience.
How We Can Help
We provide different types of application support to your business based on your unique business needs. Our expertise in a vast range of application expertise, from Ecommerce to CMS and from Mobile Apps to LMS ensures we can support whichever platform your website is built on. Speak to us to learn more about application support for your business and about how we can help you achieve higher business stability.
