Sustenance Engineering
AFour offers an agile and comprehensive sustenance engineering solution. With broad expertise spanning diverse technologies, AFour offers a powerful sustenance model that features strong quality engineering teams working onsite and offshore. AFour can provide customers with Level Three support that includes managing the code, making code changes, and delivering well tested solutions for application bugs. AFour continually strives to deliver high quality solutions in a timely and cost-effective manner.
As part of our sustenance engineering offering, we help our customers in supporting previous versions of the product, allowing them to focus on the strategy and directions for future releases. With our understanding of the product architecture and development expertise, we are able to recreate user problems and fix the issues as part of the engagement. To make sure that the rest of the features still work as desired, appropriate regression tests are performed. In case of a security bug or vulnerability, a security test is also performed to check that the fix does not create a new vulnerability.
We perform the following activities as part of Sustenance Engineering service
- Re-create user problems and devise workarounds
- Manage code and make code changes
- Release periodic patches and deliver permanent solutions
- Performance Tuning and Optimization
- End of Life product support
- Coordinate with development teams for future releases
Technical Support
Technical support plays an important role in establishing good Quality of Service (QoS) and directly impacts the overall customer experience. In many organizations, software testing teams often provides required knowhow about new features, changes, etc. to customer support teams. Also, in many organizations software testing and customer support team members are rotated periodically for better understanding of customer point of view as well as product enhancements.
AFour is a software testing focused organization. Many of our clients expect us to provide assistance in their customer support activities as they believe that AFour team understands their product inside out and hence can do justice to customer queries and address their concerns efficiently.
AFour clients typically have well defined support organizations / departments in place. AFour team, that has worked on the products for considerable duration, often participates in customer support activities on a rotation basis. Typically AFour team members handle first line of support (through emails, chats, etc) providing product support, and basic troubleshooting of issues. The issues that are not resolved in the first line of support are escalated to a higher line of support where a core member of customer support team handles it by spending more time with the end user.
Customer support activities are monitored by establishing metrics like following:
- Customer Satisfaction rating for last week / last month
- First reply time
- Tickets created / resolved ratio
AFour team provides periodic reports with above statistics to the client.
KPIs like average satisfaction rating, average first reply time, etc. are monitored to match up to industry standard.