The Future of Support

14 | published by Scott Szarapka on Thursday, April 14, 2011

I guess I should probably introduce myself first... I'm Scott, the newest team member here at LemonStand, and I'm excited to be here. I have a background in Enterprise Architecture & Security, Business Development and I can even program on a good day. I'm really looking forward to utilizing my skills to create amazing and unique experiences for you, the customer! The team here has built a truly fantastic product and provided an amazing customer experience, and I can only hope to build upon that and live up to the very high standards they've set.

I'm here to discuss the future of our support. We love support, a huge goal of ours is to provide support that's leaps and bounds ahead of our competitors. And from what we hear, you guys love our support too, and that means a lot to us! So today we want to include you in our discussions surrounding the future of our support program. As with any business, we want to grow, expand and turn LemonStand into the best product it can possibly be as well as create an industry leading support program to back that up.

Currently support takes up a large part of our day, and it's getting harder and harder for us to balance support and developing new features for LemonStand itself. We find that if we shift our focus to more development tasks, both our support response time as well as response quality drops. We see a similar situation if we shift focus towards support, the development time for new features, as well as the quality of our development drops.

Both of these situations are unacceptable in our opinion. We want to put together a support model that is going to allow us to maintain the same high quality support that you're used too, while still being able to run a viable business and add exciting new features to LemonStand. Internally we've been discussing these issue for the last little while, and decided that we really wanted to get your opinions and feedback on how we should approach this, as we value it!

Some of the things that we've been discussing include:

Limiting the amount of support tickets that can be submitted based on the license type. We're thinking that Developer licenses should include 2 free support tickets, which cannot stack (Meaning if you have more than one developer license, you still only get 2 support tickets). For commercial licenses, they would include 3 support tickets, and they of course would stack (So if you have 1 license, you get 3, 2 licenses, 6, and so on...).
Limit the Scope of Support Tickets: Support Tickets will now cover issues with the LemonStand core + Official Modules.
Create a Development Assistance Support Ticket: If you're a developer that needs some help developing on LemonStand - these tickets will allow you to submit support requests for Development Assitance with your project. Development Assistance tickets will cost more than Standard Support Tickets.
Adding a bug tracking module to the forums for customers to submit bugs, instead of using the support ticket system.
For those that need more support than the initial tickets included with the Developer & Commercial licenses, introducing two programs to allow customers to purchase additional support. The first program would allow customers to purchase support tickets in bundles of 5, 10, 15, etc. The second would be a support subscription, allowing for unlimited support tickets for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months.
Support Hours: Monday - Friday, 9-5 PST.

Like we've mentioned, providing high quality support is a very important goal of ours, and something that we want to make sure that you're all satisifed with. We would really value your opinions, ideas and feedback on support and look forward to discussing this further! Please post your opinions, ideas and feedback either in the blog comments or on the following forum thread: http://forum.lemonstandapp.com/topic/1696-the-future-of-support/

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