Trigent Insights newsletter - Achieving 24 x 7 product support with offshore technical support

Amongst the various challenges in building and taking a product through its lifecycle, technical support for the product is one of the most vital mechanisms that determine the product′s success.

Increasingly, companies are exploring possibilities of using offshore resources for not only product development, but technical product support. Not first level calls or handling basic user, but second and third level support. For instance:

Customization of products for new customers as they come in
Training and handholding for new customers who install your software
Email response management
Alert handling for troubleshooting problems in nightly builds and automated testing
Enhancements from new marketing requirements
Escalation of bug fixes and maintenance requests
Monitoring of infrastructure where software is supplied as a service

As companies around the world are discovering, offshore outsourcing of these support activities can save lots of time and money. And there are specific advantages:

You get "follow the sun" support using time zones as leverage. Your customers can expect faster turnaround time for bugs as offshore teams take over from in-house teams.
Customers see more features added rapidly, giving you a competitive edge
Product launches need not wait for support to come up to speed, if you have an offshore team in place that is scalable and flexible.
A lot of support and infrastructure activities are usually routine and simple, but time consuming and repetitive. Offshore resources can complete these tasks cost effectively and quickly.

Looks simple? It's not always easy. To ensure a product/service is "always on" you need a team of skilled people across geographies to work in unison. You need processes for knowledge sharing, collaboration and workflow automation. You also need tools that automate alerts and trigger events from remote locations, and a vendor to manage all this for you.

Offshore teams can help you get and keep new customers at a faster pace, support your software better, ensure support costs are within control and also help your team be more productive.

If you'd like to learn more about how we can help you with 24 x 7 technical support for your products and applications, please contact us at http://www.trigent.com.