Advantages of 24/7 Support

If you have been working in e-commerce for a while, you're aware of the struggle of keeping your store up during peak business hours while still managing a consistent stream of new development, bug fixes, and security/performance mitigations. It is a delicate balance that every business owner must factor in when planning to make changes. Sure, when your entire team is working in the same time zone you get answers to questions faster but the remainder of the day is wasted, sitting idle and waiting for your team to come back online. Here at Binary Anvil, we strive to optimize that idle time by maintaining a global development team, spread across 3 continents, for round-the-clock support. By staffing most of our departments with a minimum of one person from each geographical office and offsetting schedules, we can maintain continuous coverage for all issues that arise. These actions have the most benefits in four core areas: Production Deployments, Regularly Scheduled Development, SLA1/2 Emergencies, and supporting our clients.

1. Production Deployments: You would not shut down your brick-and-mortar store in the middle of your day to paint the walls so why would you schedule a production deployment during peak business hours? Our global infrastructure and project management team enable us to schedule production deployments during off-hours for your business. We schedule deployments based on your business' time zone so you can rest easy knowing that you are not losing sales due to the website being in maintenance mode. Since our global developer and quality assurance teams actively test during the production deployments, you can trust when you wake up and test your site, you will not be walking into a failed deployment and a fire drill to start your day. As part of our standard process, we have a rollback process for production deployments: if the changes are not complete or up to our standards by a certain time, we revert the deployment and work on the blockers offline to avoid interruptions to your sales flow. 
    
2. Development: Project managers are the lynchpins, the shepherds, of the software development life cycle. They keep your tickets moving, escalate and unblock issues, and maintain your priorities. By assigning an overseas counterpart for our US project managers, we can more effectively optimize each shift and keep the work moving. By using this approach we can avoid the snowball effect of tickets piling up on a single project manager and slowing down the sprint, while still maintaining the directional over site of each project. This team effort also allows us to gauge the capacity of each developer when assigning tickets to be worked on instead of unnecessarily delaying development by overloading a select few developers with the majority of tickets. By sharing our projects and our responsibilities, we can more fluidly adapt and react to your ever-changing priorities. All of this culminates in our ability to stretch the capacity of your sprint and get more done, faster, while still maintaining the integrity of our changes #BuildItRight. These advantages are not exclusive to our project managers either. When a developer finishes work and is ready to deploy their changes to staging, we have an infrastructure team member available to deploy it. If a ticket needs clarification on requirements while you, the client, are asleep, a business analyst can review and unblock the ticket. If a backend is working on a ticket that needs some frontend work or needs a module to be configured, we have frontend developers and data administrators available to continue the forward progress. Ultimately, unless an SLA1/2 emergency pulls our resources away, we have someone on each team who can continue the work without having to wait 16 hours for the next business day to complete the task. 
    
3. SLA1/2 Emergencies: We've all been there, it's 3:30 pm, and all of a sudden your ERP integration stops running, none of your customers' orders are flowing through, and thus cannot be shipped. You've tried all of the usual suspects but cannot identify the root cause of the issue so you create an SLA2 ticket with your ERP vendor. An hour and a half goes by and now it's 5 o'clock and the issue is still not resolved and it's time for everyone to go home - you will have to wait and pick it up first thing in the morning. Not at Binary Anvil. While we will never make a blanket promise to have all emergencies resolved in a set time frame (who can?), we can promise that we have a team available 24/7 ready to respond, investigate, and communicate any emergency that might arise. If the issue runs into the end of a shift, we have another fully staffed team beginning their day that can handle the emergency with a simple handoff. 
    
4. Global Support for our Global Clients: E-commerce revolutionized the sale of goods to customers by allowing businesses to further expand their customer base not only locally, but also globally. Our 24/7 global support teams allow us to more actively and effectively support our clients who have multiple offices around the world. We can schedule your production deployments at a time that impacts the least overall customers and have a full team available to make sure it goes smoothly and the changes are working. And with our round-the-clock PM coverage, your EU customer service team will not have to wait for US business hours to receive a response from our team. Global businesses need a global agency to support them.

Binary Anvil is fully staffed with teams around the globe. Each team consists of full-time employees (no, not contractors or third-party agencies) available to our Support clients for day-to-day development, bug fixes, SLA1/2 emergencies, and handling production deployments during off hours. This enables us to offer truly round-the-clock support, agile teams, and faster, more productive deployments so that you can rest easy and focus on strategy, road-mapping, and scaling your companies. If 24/7 support would benefit your business, contact us to learn more.