With the recent release of GeoTime® 5.5.3, the GeoTime team aimed to deliver agile responses to critical customer issues. In the past, most customer issues that required development repair were addressed in major releases of the software. The releases of GeoTime 5.5.2 and now 5.5.3 underscore our commitment to recognizing and addressing the most serious issues as they occur.
Here is support, we coordinate weekly with product management, quality assurance, and development teams. We are in constant communication about new or ongoing support requests, usability issues, and new technical challenges reported by users. Every member of the team has experience providing direct support to our users, which allows us to quickly identify the impact of critical issues and more effectively coordinate responses. When a GeoTime team member is away, the rest of the team provides seamless backup.
Many support issues are received by our product management team as they work with new users starting off in GeoTime. Most other requests come directly to technical support by email or by phone. The entire GeoTime team has access to the support phone line and voice mailbox to ensure consistent support coverage, and direct contact with all other team members. This helps us to quickly escalate an issue when required.
If we identify a bug, then we discuss ideas for addressing it quickly, and then put a plan in place to address it on a permanent basis. Patch releases are reserved for the most critical issues. Most of the time, we can suggest a workaround that bypasses the issue or minimizes its impact. In these cases, we schedule the bug for repair in the next major release. If we decide to issue a patch, we perform a complete QA evaluation, and then package it for distribution to users.
As a dynamic team, the key has been to keep everyone consistently informed. We all have a better understanding of both the state of the product and the needs of our users. It’s easier for us to address problems when we don’t have to preface discussions with background information.