As one of the most recent additions to the Commerce Guys team—I’m the new Director of Customer Support & Service—I’ve been presented with a unique and exciting challenge: to further develop how Commerce Guys offers support of Drupal Commerce in a way that meets current market needs and implements commercial software support industry standards, all in the context of the largest self-supporting, open-source community there is. 

I like big challenges.

So with the help of the team here, I’ve set about studying, listening, and learning. I’ve pored over forums, read through resolved Turbo Tickets, and reviewed business artifacts from our most successful projects. And through that, I’ve seen that with Drupal Commerce—

there’s a need to fill—to offer ongoing support for businesses running live commerce sites, making sure they minimize downtime and have an expert available whenever problems may arise.

We see this most commonly with our Delivery Partners, the teams charged with integrating Drupal Commerce successfully in unique and complicated contexts, and they have inspired us to bring a few new things to the marketplace.

Available in 2014: Support Subscription Packages

Many of our Delivery Partners have been asking for the same thing: to continue to own their relationships with their users, but to be able to count on having Commerce Guys there to support Drupal Commerce specifically. Some of our Delivery Partners just need a basic level of support—a few tickets a year and peace of mind knowing that they’ll get a response within a specific time frame—while others need a more comprehensive offering, like 24-7 coverage for anything, most importantly their major, show-stopping issues. 

I’m happy to share that starting now, we’re offering Drupal Commerce Support Packages. We’ve designed these subscription-based packages based on our experiences with you, our partners and customers, so that we can offer the right amount of support for businesses of all sizes. 

The details of each of the packages can be found in our new Support Offering Data Sheet, but in a nutshell: we’re offering Support Standard, Support Plus, and Support Premium packages, each with incremental degrees of support availability, response times, and available support tickets. 

If you’re interested in leveraging Commerce Guys’ support, but aren’t a delivery partner—get in touch with us. We’re more than happy to help you find a Delivery Partner with a proven track record, or we can come up with a custom package to meet the needs of your business, no matter the size.

We believe that through Commerce Support packages, we’ll have the opportunity to help our Delivery Partners be more successful by helping them solve complex issues and making sure we’re maximizing their sites’ uptime. I’m excited that Commerce Support packages will give us the chance to have ongoing relationships with the developers who depend on Drupal Commerce every day. We hope you’re as enthusiastic as we are about the launch of these services, and I invite you to learn more (the aforementioned data sheet provides quite a bit more detail, but you can always contact us for additional information).

Honoring the Roots of Drupal: Individual Contributors

I want to be perfectly clear that while we at Commerce Guys are taking big steps to promote larger efforts like support subscriptions and bigger projects with our Delivery Partners, we haven’t forgotten our roots—namely, the individual developers who continue to provide Drupal’s greatest asset of community support. 

We will continue to actively participate in all of the discussions that happen all over the Web—Drupal.org, Reddit, StackOverflow, and of course our own sites—and we won’t lose our passion for moving Drupal Commerce forward with you, together. Although I’ve only been with Commerce Guys a short while now, it’s become obvious to me that the Drupal Commerce community is one of communicators and creative problem solvers, and I look forward to continuing that relationship through online conversations.

In addition to that, we will continue to offer Turbo Tickets, our à la carte support offering, for those times when developers are in a jam and just need an expert to dig into one specific issue. Turbo Tickets are an analysis service for development support, and not a code-fixing offering or production-site support—so think of us in that context more as advisors than mechanics—but I’m proud of the fact that the majority of our Turbo Ticket users have reported high satisfaction, and Turbo Tickets continue to be a great way to get quick answers to developers. 

The Number One Rule in Software Support: Listen to Your Users

Much like Drupal and Drupal Commerce themselves, we at Commerce Guys will always be evolving, pushing the boundaries of what we can do, and asking ourselves and our users how we can do better. So in that spirit, I’m issuing an open invitation to you as a member of the Drupal Commerce community: Tell me what you’d like to see next. The top priority of anyone in software support should be to listen first—as the saying goes, “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved,”—and along with the rest of the Commerce Guys team, I am eager to hear from you, our users, customers, and Delivery Partners about new needs as you see them. I can be reached at jaime@commerceguys.com, and I look forward to your feedback.