Why are Whitespace so passionate about support?

Our support manager Paul Brotherton had a slow day, and wrote 1160 words on his (and Whitespace's) passion for support. And yes, our support service is fully bilingual (even though our website is not)

Effective websites change and evolve over time, and at Whitespace we place a high value in providing long-term web solutions for our clients. We’re not just your web agency, we are your web partner and it is therefore a source of professional pride for us to know that your site is always fully functional, completely up to date, and online…even when you are not.

We know from our own customer feedback that the levels of availability and service offered by our support is one of the highest-rated benefits for our clients, it’s a reason that a lot of clients choose Whitespace in the first place, and many of the personal relationships that we have built up have been in place since we first started the company six years ago.

Support is not just a sales strategy, and it’s not just for when something goes wrong. A support contract is peace of mind - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - for us as well as for you. Almost all our sites are sold with our standard support package, which means that we currently provide support for over 50 clients - and every single one of them is equally important.

Apart from actually fixing any day-to-day issues that can arise we also answer questions about functionality, figure out more effective or user-friendly solutions to problems, and make technical recommendations to you. Where necessary, we keep an eye on security updates for your servers and CMS, all key third-party modules and plugins, and proactively suggest work that should be done or enhancements that you might have overlooked. With our support, you are guaranteed that the overall health of your site is on someone else’s checklist, not yours.

More often than not support requests aren’t even about support - Whitespace, after all, delivers quality. Instead, they are about new development on existing sites. Pushing these expansions and functionality updates through our dedicated support portal is often a faster and financially smarter way for you to get the changes you require quickly and efficiently without the need to involve the entire development team or budget for a whole sprints worth of work.

There are very few things that expire or depreciate faster than technology (bananas being the obvious exception). Your website itself won’t expire that quickly, but with each passing month and year there are new design trends, updated Google algorithms, additional features that your clients demand, and user-experience techniques to top the ones that were the best-of-the-best before. Regardless of whether your site needs a tune up, new features added, or just a few updates completed; our support team provides the full-service work that you need quickly and efficiently.

Likewise, social culture and client/customer opinions and preferences are also variables. Change is constant, needs evolve, and therefore your web solutions must be flexible, dynamic, and scalable. Moving parts need to be adjusted as time goes on. The options for and reasons behind upgrades are endless, and our web support team can help you to stay relevant and spot potential problems before they occur.

If the answer was always that simple, we wouldn’t take our job as seriously as we do. Technology stacks are getting complex and with the massive increase in third-party dependencies and programming options comes a huge increase in potential sources of code conflicts and software problems.

Debugging and fully understanding the issues you are facing can be a huge challenge, as can actually fixing them. Problems can range from the simplest coding or syntax errors, outdated or legacy code bases, right through to software conflicts in any part of your stack, or more serious server or database errors. We deal with all of it, without asking you silly questions.

Thankfully this doesn’t happen often, but hacked websites are a constant danger in the web industry. With our support, your website is given the best protection possible against hacking attempts and malware by the latest and strongest security updates, modules, and plugins. And if, despite all odds, your website goes down anyway, we’ll have it back up in no time, even if the breach happens after-hours. Sometimes, the hosting company themselves are responsible - and in this case we’ll communicate with them directly so that you don’t have to.

Our support is made up of full-stack developers with decades of experience, which means that they don’t just delegate a problem - because they are programmers themselves, they directly deal with the issues regardless of the technology stack and where in that stack the problem lies. Everything from front end styling tweaks to server health problems, from CMS optimisations to code refactoring.

Whitespace support is never more than an email or a phone call away, but are proactive enough to see and fix problems before you (or your customers) are even aware of them. There’s very little we haven’t seen before, and very little that we can’t fix quickly and efficiently.

We use Zendesk as a dedicated support portal for clients, and have a wide range of other tools at our disposal to provide early warning of disruptions to uptime, replicate your browsing environment, and get your problem solved with the minimum of fuss.

Our response times to support tickets are measured in minutes, not in hours or days. We are available in the evenings and weekends if necessary and sometimes, we’ve even been known to investigate support requests before we’ve had coffee in the mornings (although we can’t always guarantee this level of commitment, for obvious reasons).

• 60 - the number of clients with active support contracts
• 200 - the number of end-users who can (and do!) request help
• 90% - the number of support requests solved within an hour of being reported (95% within four hours)
• 800 - the average number of support tickets per year
• 6 - the number of minutes you’ll need to wait for a reply (20 outside office hours)
• 7834 - the number of problems fixed, and counting

Believe it or not, you don’t even need to be a Whitespace client to benefit from our support. Perhaps you are unhappy with your current agency, or simply want a second opinion on their recommendations? Perhaps that site you built yourself ten years ago is getting too big for you to maintain

Perhaps you simply value an additional pair of eyes on a problem that’s particularly difficult to pin down, or want someone else’s professional opinion?

We’re happy to perform health checks on your server or your code base, provide unbiased and professional feedback on your designs or suggest functionality updates on your site - with no obligation whatsoever. Why? Because good web is a passion and is directly or indirectly beneficial to everyone who has or delivers an online presence. Contact us, and we’ll get you back on track.