Support and Maintenance FAQs
What onboarding do you offer to new clients?
We’ll introduce your team members with whom we’ll be working closely to our support systems to ensure everyone is familiar with the lines of communication, how to raise issues, and expected response times.
What is the support process?
We provide telephone and email support from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.
We have continuous site monitoring, which we can configure to send emails to individuals in your organisation if desired.
If you have specific services which require specific monitoring we can discuss these with you.
The general process for reporting and resolving an issue is as follows:
- We receive an email, ticket or phone call
- A ticket is created and all relevant parties are notified
- It is reviewed by first line support
- It is either passed to a developer to resolve or further information is requested
- Once it is fixed locally, a developer pushes the fix to a non-production environment for review by the client (usually a ‘dev’ or UAT’ site)
- Upon sign-off it is then deployed to production
- The ticket is marked as resolved
We operate a support ticketing system and we provide an on-boarding meeting for new clients where we talk them through how to use it, as well as how we work, what we bill for, and all other relevant aspects of our support service.
Both Drupal core and contrib modules are updated regularly. The standard security announcement schedule is after hours on the third Wednesday of the month, so the team reviews and applies any less than Highly Critical updates on the third Thursday. Any Highly Critical issues are patched immediately at release even if this is outside working hours.
If any Drupal updates cause issues with extant custom code, this issue will be logged in the support system like any other issue and assigned an appropriate priority.
Tickets can be raised for any reason, including but not limited to content management issues, server log information, subject access requests, third-party service issues and issues arising from planned server infrastructure updates.
These are all things which we have helped clients with before: we take the attitude that we are endeavouring to help the client with all their digital needs rather than just sandboxing ourselves to the Drupal codebase.
Can we get more significant pieces of development work?
When development is required that constitutes a mini-project in itself, this will follow the project process with stages to discover, define, design, develop and deploy new features. This will maximise efficiency and ensure a focus on delivering user-centred solutions. The process can contract or expand in time and resource depending on the size and scope of the changes required.
What is the minimum contract length?
We currently offer a 12 month rolling contract, payable monthly in advance. The contract will automatically renew every 12 months unless either party states otherwise. Either party may terminate the support agreement by giving 30 days’ written notice.
How do I know how much support time is available to me?
The support ticketing system shows you how much time you have remaining each month. It is updated hourly on weekdays during business hours. If you need any specific information at any point you can request it from us.
What happens if I do not use all my minutes in a particular month?
Unused minutes from the previous month may be rolled over to the current month, and it is allowed to build up to a maximum of twice the monthly allowance.
What happens if my support request takes longer than the remaining time for that month?
If a support request looks certain to exceed your monthly allowance we will contact you via our ticketing system before starting work. If your allowance is exceeded by a small amount we can deduct it from the next month’s allowance. If there is a significant overuse it will be charged for pro rata up to a maximum of 1 day (7 hours) after which it is charged at our standard day rate unless otherwise specified in the contract. Please note that if you require an extensive reworking of your website we will be happy to negotiate a new development contract separate from our support.
What are your hours of support?
Our office hours are 9:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. Within these hours, we offer a one hour response time to incoming issues. Support requests received after 16:00 will receive a first line response within one working hour extending to the next working day as necessary, although we will always do our best to respond the same day.
Support Agreement and Service Levels
Our standard support and maintenance agreement is provided as a separate document accompanying this proposal, for your reference. This sets out in detail our service levels and is the support contract that we would expect to put in place with Client name.
Estimated support costs
Our support agreement is flexible to your needs and has a monthly hourly allowance that is determined by agreement with the client and charged at our prevailing standard hourly rate (currently £120 + VAT). Any additional work required by a client during any month is chargeable at the same hourly rate (but, unlike allotted hours, the availability of additional hours is not guaranteed).
Across the spectrum of clients we support, the monthly hourly allowance ranges from 2 hours (our minimum commitment) at the lower end to more than 30 hours per month at the higher end.
We would expect a client like Client name to be working on a continuous improvement model alongside your roadmap projects, so it’s likely that your support agreement will initially be in the region of x to y hours per month (though it could be set at a lower level initially, should you wish). Once the agreement is up and running, we can then review your actual usage over time and adjust the monthly level of support accordingly.