April 13, 2017
Your website is a key touchpoint for your customers and prospects. Accordingly, after your Sitecore website has been built or upgraded, it is crucial to ensure it continues to run as it should and to make necessary enhancements over time.
Valtech’s support and maintenance services offer emergency support for critical issues, from diagnosis to resolution. Non-critical issues, are reported through a ticket system and prioritized based on client need.
In this article I'd like to reveal the top three most common Sitecore maintenance and support requests we receive from clients at our Service Desk.
1. Critical issue diagnosis and resolution
When a critical issue has been identified, the entire team is immediately mobilized. The most common cause of a critical issue like a website outage is attack vulnerability. Injection vulnerabilities, for example, are rated as the number one problem on the list of top 10 security issues according to the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
Website outages and other critical issues can cause prospects and customers to go elsewhere for products, services, and information. To prevent this from happening, you need a dedicated web team that understands your build and is ready to take action to get your website online again as soon as possible.
2. Content Author support
Sitecore is an enterprise-level platform; it’s not an entry-level product. Because Sitecore can be so highly customized, some degree of training and support is necessary. Even the most knowledgeable and well-trained content author will sometimes need support in areas in which they lack expertise or when they recognize the need for enhancements that would improve their own day-to-day productivity and experience. Content authoring support is the most common request we get to our Service Desk, and around 70% of our requests are related to the topics below:
- Content that is not loading in all browsers;
- Issues with workflow and content approval;
- Component customizations for specific needs in a multisite environment;
- More efficient usage of Language fallback – for multilingual websites.
Other common requests from content authors are related to preserving or enhancing the user (e.g. web visitor) experience. They are aware that a sub-optimal user experience may damage a brand, impact conversions, or cause customers to search elsewhere for products and services. Marketers and content authors want to:
- Ensure their websites are responsive and are loading appropriately on all devices;
- Customize the design and styling of specific components to improve the user experience
3. Third-party Sitecore integrations
Sitecore is a powerful CMS and marketing platform on its own, but integrations with other technologies can further enhance its capabilities. The majority of our clients’ Sitecore implementations have integrations with third-party systems.
Consider: What happens when changes are made to your third-party systems? Most of the time your Sitecore build needs to be customized to accommodate for these changes. This kind of customization should only ever be provided by an expert Sitecore development team in order to avoid introducing bugs to your application.
Valtech’s maintenance team has experience implementing major integrations for Sitecore builds, such us: CRM, Salesforce, Telligent, Coveo, Lucene, Google search, Bing, and many more.
It’s important to have a Sitecore Support Service team in place, whether internal or external to your organization. Contact us if you would like to learn more about our Sitecore maintenance and support services.
