CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
As long as your product has been accurately described and advertised,
and your support materials are good, most customers should not need to
use support at all. However, you should expect a few to become frequent
faces in your ticket system.The enD ClienT PRobleM
As Perch has become a more mature product, one set of difficult custom-
ers has started to appear, and for products like ours they’re probably only
going to increase. Because our software is installed by our customers
for their clients, we have started to be contacted by those end clients, the
people or company who had the CMS installed by a Web designer. How we
have dealt with this makes for a case study in how to deal with the very
specific situations that show up in support of certain products.
We can generally identify someone as an end client when we see a
support request that reads something like: “How do I add an image to my
‘About’ page?” or “I can’t log into my Perch.” We usually ask people whom
we suspect to be an end client, “Did you install Perch yourself?” We then
get to hear the story of how their website was developed by a designer
who has disappeared, or with whom the client has fallen out. Sometimes
the client doesn’t want to pay for updates and thinks they should be able
to manage things themselves from now on. We had one client get in touch
who was trying to transfer a license because, sadly, their designer had died.
The more established Perch becomes as a product, the more of these situa-
tions we have to deal with.
The end client situation poses a few problems. First is the legal one
of who owns the license. Our contract is with the person who bought the
license: if that was the Web designer then our contract is with the designer.
No matter how hard done by the client is (or thinks they are), we can’t just
give them control over the license, so we have to explain they need to contact
the designer and get the designer to place a license transfer request with us.