How to assure Customer satisfaction during maintenance

Most important thing about maintenance is satisfaction of Customer, no matter if support of the system is carried out by developer or by outsourcing company. All who deal with maintenance from both sides of process agree that Customer is satisfied when his minimal efforts are enough to have supported software product stable and running. What should company that provides maintenance do to have its Customer satisfied? We believe that the most important are the following:

Theoretically those postulates sound natural and easy. But real life always makes corrections: work load is not balanced – yesterday team was idle and today faced a dozen of tasks that have same critical priority, budget is tight and due date is today.
 

So what are the bricks which maintenance of good quality is built from?

Budget – always should be in focus, not only when it is going to be exceeded. Do you like to change your plans? No one does like. That is why all assumptions made in estimates should be named explicitly. This will allow avoiding “sudden” budget inflating and will help to earn reputation of reliable partner.
 

Maintenance should be proactive. If you see possibilities to improve workflow and supported system propose them to the Customer. Customer should also be informed about possible problems in advance.

Follow the priorities. Organize maintenance in priority order. Ask Customer to set priority for tasks or approve your prioritizing. If several tasks have same priority the most critical tasks should be selected.

No bugs in production. All releases should be essentially tested before delivering to the production even if only minor changes done. System dependencies can be rather tricky and not obvious, especially in systems with nontrivial logic. Changes made and tested in one module can generate errors in other module, which interfere with changed one. And no one will argue that maintenance which produces errors is not kind of service that any Customer needs. Our practice shows that integral testing before release worth spent efforts even if the insignificant changes were done.

Interaction with Customer should be always friendly. Communications should be polite and positive, Customer should feel the respect. It is pleasant to say and hear congratulations before Easter or Christmas for example, and they can help to create more open atmosphere of cooperation. But extreme approaches, such as familiarity, should be avoided.

Problems and solutions should be understandable even for non-technical Customer representatives. Otherwise you can get into situation when wrong work was properly done. It is necessary to exclude misunderstanding, both sides in dialog should be absolutely sure that they talk about same things. This can be reached by attention to the details and by excluding appearing of unclear moments in scope of work.
 

Flexible resources can be a powerful advantage. As a rule maintenance workload is floating. That is why our company provides possibility to vary support team productivity by it expanding or reducing.

Try to improve maintenance constantly. Time after time review all done work, find weakest points and improve them. Customer satisfaction feedback could help to find these weak points.

Of course this is not a warranty that your Customer will be satisfied, but following above mentioned recommendations will definitely make him more satisfied. At least we are following them and we are proud of our satisfied Customers.

Meanwhile we do not want to underestimate importance of technologies. And maintenance of projects developed on the platform of .Net and Java technologies will definitely have some differences. And surely without technical competences maintenance is impossible. But nevertheless we are convinced that the secret of successful maintenance lay mostly in non-technical area.