Support as a service: Manage your way to subscription revenue

Support offerings can be incredibly lucrative for Drupal development shops. They can also be a complete nightmare, resulting in not just monetary loss but low morale, high staff turnover and a bad reputation.

After many years in the trenches, as both a vendor and client, I've seen it all. 

At PreviousNext, we enter into ongoing support agreements with almost all of our clients. Many of these have developed into fruitful collaborations with new opportunities developing regularly. But we haven't always got it right, and there have been times where I've asked myself, "Is this really worth it?!"

The answer is (almost always) "YES!", but only if you're doing it right. And doing it right requries answering questions such as: How do you price support work? What tracking tools do you need? How should you allocate staff to support work? What systems do you have in place for identifying pain points and escalating issues?

In this session, I will cover:

• The benefits of a successful support model (recurring billings, long-term client relationships, better development practices, more collaboration among your team, ongoing opportunities for new work)
• How the development phase will make or break support
• Best practices around support management and communication
• Common mistakes and pitfalls that affect quality of support for businesses of all sizes