Does Your Drupal Support Provider Care?

With the right approach, the Drupal company supporting your platform can be the accelerant that propels your business to the next level. Just ask any stakeholder who successfully scaled their product with the help of a quality support partner.

And just as a premium partnership can do the world of good for your organization, there are Drupal support providers that can do the opposite.

Today, we’re talking about Drupal companies that treat support and maintenance services as an afterthought. Some problems may have surfaced from the agency team, now supporting and maintaining the product they helped launch.

But… how do you recognize that support is just an afterthought for your current support provider? What're the important signs?  

Maybe there’s a feature you’ve wanted for a while that they’re just not able to get around to. Maybe the team has repeatedly been unable to meet the deadlines they’ve committed to. But if you frequently feel like there’s something missing in the website support provider services you’re receiving, it’s possible that support isn’t their number one.

Does it matter all that much? As it turns out, yes, it matters a great deal. Poor support and maintenance provisions cost a great deal.

The cost of ignoring support is high.

Besides additional features, all code requires cleanups from time to time. Without regular tune-ups and performance monitoring, your Drupal site could be very slow to load, your download times could end up being painfully long, and the cost for future changes would be needlessly high. Errors and inconsistent experiences for your visitors—these are embarrassing situations.

The costs are dependent on your platform or application. If you’re running a platform or app that helps people find warm cabins in the middle of the Cascades, the stakes are high. A broken module desperately in need of an update may end up preventing one of your customers from booking. This isn’t an extreme example.

Or maybe you’re running a platform that tries to aggregate some brilliant course material for those challenging economics courses at Stanford. Clogged-up Drupal installations that need a bit of fine-tuning could very well result in your user, an angry grad student, looking elsewhere for the content they require.

At the end of the day, issues like these affect your customers’ experience and their purchase decision. Every time that happens, you lose business.

Good user experiences are based on trust. Your customers need to be able to trust that you will provide a consistent, high-quality experience every time. And it’s hard to build that trust without a reliable support partner backing you all the way.

So many support providers, so few to choose from.

Drupal companies that handle builds tend to prioritize development work over support. It's always more exciting being new, exciting, and also more cost-effective to put precious resources on high-value projects. These agencies have their sets of business objectives, and support is not their core business. Your problems are not at the top of their priority list, just because their business is not designed that way.

The result? For those looking for proactive, trustworthy Drupal support providers, there aren’t enough options.

Imagine walking into the supermarket looking for a crosshead screwdriver of a particular size. Except that when you reach the aisles containing hardware, you can only see flatheads.

Unfortunately, it’s the same with support. There just aren’t enough options out there focused on reliability and proactiveness when it comes to choosing a Drupal support provider. In short, there aren’t enough services focused on customer success.

We’ve identified a burning problem—the lack of Drupal support and maintenance with a focus on customer success. And it’s our endeavor to solve this.

It's time to look at things differently.   

When it’s done right, website support goes much deeper than just fixing bugs. Ultimately, support is closely tied to your business success. Ensuring that you get what you need from the platform or application.

For a Drupal company that is thinking about customer success, support would also mean: how can we help our client achieve the outcomes they want from this website? The right partner is asking themselves questions like:

• What's our customer's purpose?
• Conversions. Which matter most to them?
• What do we consider an urgent situation?
• What's the response time and solution level needed for critical issues?

Beginning your questioning from a point that is grounded in customer success ensures that you’re pointed in the right direction. The right Drupal company also behaves differently from solely build-focused agencies for whom support is secondary.

• Their focus on creating value, rather than simply doing a bare minimum.
• The team thinks from your perspective, anticipating and addressing proactively.
• They listen to you instead of being resistant to inconvenience.
• They are experienced enough to know when something major will affect you.
• They are willing to learn from their experiences and adapt to your needs.

In the right hands, your business can benefit immensely, as your support team creates tangible business value through the careful application of their skills. Like a great pit crew makes sure that you’re firing on all cylinders.

Support is an afterthought for your current Drupal support provider if customer success isn't part of their vocabulary, their practices, and their execution. No decision maker should limit their organization’s potential by opting for a partner who is not thinking about long term goals.

Instead, choose a support partner who is invested in your business success, so you can get a more holistic picture and find better answers to all of your questions.