Support and service level agreements

In the previous article we wrote about some ways to choose software. In this, I’m going to talk about one specific thing: support.

How crucial is your student software to your business operations? Can you cope if it is down for a day or two? Would a few minutes of down time during peak enrolments cause a massive loss in sales? Somewhere along that continuum you will find yourself a happy medium, between the service and stability you need and the cost of that reliability. Call it support, call it an SLA, all you want to know is that if your software stops working there is someone at the other end of the phone to fix your problems, who isn’t going to charge you and arm and a leg to restore service.

Believe it or not, there are products on the market who consider themselves to be free of all responsibility when your software fails – try reading those lengthy EULAs some time! These are not usually the hosted providers – they are often very responsive to critical product faults, because part of their service to you is maintaining your connection to their database. But before you seriously consider any solution on the market, consider the cost of support. If you are billed for each call you make to report a software fault, you will very quickly learn to live with glitches, or else you will run up a sizable bill.

Some points to consider for service level agreements:

1. What support can I expect if my software/service becomes unavailable? Incidents happen. Hardware fails, links go down, software has bugs. You need to know what the procedure is for reporting an incident, how it will be dealt with and who you can contact in times of emergency. Do you expect business hours support or support out of hours? Do you want to speak to a person, or are you confident logging incidents via email? What sort of response time do you expect from your service provider? How much will they charge? onCourse offers a range of support agreements for the small business through to the enterprise business, with established Service Level Agreements available on request. All annual support contracts are for unlimited usage, so there are no unexpected charges.

2. How will I be charged for improvements to the product? Any reputable software development company will have a regular development-testing-release cycle that includes fixing of bugs, improvement to current features and development of new features. Some businesses charge for these upgrades, others provide them for free. If you request a new function in your software, In many instances, you can expect to be quoted or charged for requests for software changes. If you are an RTO, and the AVETMISS standard changes, will you be liable for the costs of updating the software? (ish is committed to ensuring onCourse remains AVETMISS compliant in all our products, including our free community version). It is important to remember that in a hosted solution it is usually not possible to ‘opt out’ of a software upgrade, because all users are upgraded via a single web service. In a locally hosted solution, you generally have the option to test the new version of the software and decide if and when you will upgrade.

3. What documentation is available for my staff to explore? Documenting software is time consuming work, but crucial for software developers to supply to their users so they can easily bring new staff up to speed. In the best case scenario, you will have access to regularly updated documentation, documentation in a form you can modify for your own business processes, and access to user forums where you can interact with, and learn from, the developers and other users of your software. We are still developing some of these processes ourselves: better ways for users to help each other, better communication channels, and nicer ways for us to deliver the documentation.

4. Service processes How does the company provide service to you when you have a problem? How quickly do they respond to acknowledge the issue and how do they track your issues so they don’t get lost in the pile? Usually they will have some sort of task tracking system to which you can add comments and where you have some level of visibility of progress.