Our Not-Really-Scientific Poll on Website Maintenance

As an agency, we provide development and support services for websites and applications.  Another way to put that is, we build apps and websites, and once they’re done, we stick around with our customers to help them manage and grow their products.

Over the years, we’ve found that a lot of people are unhappy with the post-launch support they get from their app or website.

In fact, over 60% of our maintenance customers (that is, people who depend on us for support with their application or website) are customers who used somebody else to build their app or website.

To translate, that means a lot of businesses are paying someone to build their app or website, and then using a different company to maintain and support what was built.

We decided to try and quantify this by reaching out to random marketing managers at small businesses.  We specifically targeted businesses with 11-50 employees that had an employee with a “marketing manager” role in the business.

First, we used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach out to random individuals and ask them to complete a Google Form in exchange for a free cup of coffee from Starbucks ($5 gift card). This was a simple form with only a few questions, such as:

• What type of online marketing is your company engaged in?
• Does your website integrate with other types of software like customer relationship managers (CRMs), newsletters, lead generation software, or analytics solutions?
• Do you ever encounter issues with your website that prevent you from marketing or doing other essential tasks with your website?
• When you encounter an issue, do you have a technical contact to provide support, add a feature, or fix a bug?

And here is what we found!

• Nearly 3/4 of those who responded have a person or team that they can rely on to fix their issues
• Over half of those admit that they are disappointed with the support they receive and wish it could be faster, cheaper, and more reliable

Here are the details:

1. Do you ever have issues with your application or website?

2. When you have an issue, do you have someone who can provide support?

3. Are you happy with the support they provide?

No wonder we’ve stumbled into a thriving market of maintenance and support.  It appears many of our competitors want to build products and websites but not stick around post-launch.  Yikes!