Anyone want to talk shop?
There are so many web design and development firms nowadays and probably just as many approaches to client support and maintenance. How do you support your clients?
Do you handle client web site changes?
Do you update sites for clients on a regular basis?
What tips, tricks, and processes do you use to make your life easier as you balance both new projects and web site maintenance for your clients? As our firm grows and we increase the number of clients, sometimes we’re swamped with client requests creating a backlog of work sometimes weeks long. More often than not our clients want to be at the front of the line and balancing the requests and urgency of chnages becomes a hurdle.
So I’m curious to find out how people are dealing with similar situations. Changes/Updates to sites represents a significant value to our business and impacts our revenue in amazing ways. So we’re glad to have the work. But we often find the balance and urgency is a problem and affects our other project schedules.
2 responses to “Support and maintenance”
we typically try and sell them a CMS, if not then we allocate a few days a month to do the updates with the time before spendt verifying any changes, that way all your clients know the updates will be done by the Xth of Janary, you’re never pulled off current projects at-a-whim and you can sell the benefits as “doing the best job for both new and current clients by allocating the appropriate time” we never do ad-hoc updates it causes so much aggro… if someone drops an immediate update on you then you simply say NO it will be done at the end of the month, or charge them a massive fee to pull someone off an existing job.
Hey Mark, that’s really interesting. I’ll have to think about that approach. Anyone else?