Now available: Consulting Services and Express Remote Assistance

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We have just launched Kentico Consulting Services and Express Remote Assistance. Read this blog post to learn how we can help you with complex projects or how we can assist you remotely, directly on your system.
Before I start writing about the new services, I would like to assure our partners that we are not going to compete with them. These services are focused on helping developers with complex issues that go beyond standard technical support. We are not going to do web site development - this is our partner's job.

We are introducing these services since we are often asked complex questions on architecture, performance optimization, integration and deep customizations of the CMS. As Kentico CMS gains larger share in Enterprise-level projects, the customers more and more often require advanced help that goes beyond standard technical support and needs to be answered by someone who knows Kentico CMS inside out.

Here are the options you have with our new offering:


Consulting

There will be two types of consulting services:
  • Remote Project Consulting - a live session with our consultant who will answer your questions
  • On-site Project Consulting - an in-person session with our consultant in your office 
The consulting services will be provided by our consultants who previously worked as developers of Kentico CMS. They can help with things like:
  • choosing the right archicture for your project
  • optimizing your web site performance, including optimization of your custom code
  • customization of Kentico CMS
  • integration of Kentico CMS with your existing systems or 3rd-party services.

Click here to learn more about consulting services


Express Remote Assistance

The Express Remote Assistance is an on-demand on-line assistance during which one of our support engineers connects remotely to your computer (using the GoToMeeting service) or to your web site and helps you solve the issue directly in your environment.

This will speed up the solution of the issue and eliminate the need to describe the details in depth or sending us a backup of your project. You can use this service if you're working under tight deadlines and need an immediate help directly on your system.

Click here to learn more about Express Remote Assistance


Consulting Versus Support

I'd like to point out that the new Consulting Services and Express Remote Assistance are NOT a replacement of our suppot. You will get the same support you've been receiving until now as a part of the maintenance fee. Both of these services represent an extension to our standard support, allowing our clients to get a higher-level and quick help on advanced topics. 

You can see a comparison of consulting and support in the table below:

Technical Support/Express Remote Assistance Consulting
How do I style the menu? How should I organize the content in the CMS?
How can I use this web part? Can you help me optimize the performance of my site?
How do I achieve this layout? How can I customize the shipping price calculation for using XY service?
How do I create a new document using API? How can I integrate our booking system/CRM into the site?


Pricing

The rate for Consulting Services and Express Remote Assistance is $200 per hour and it's set intentionally high for two reasons:

  • The service is provided by a very limited number of our consultants with expert knowledge of Kentico CMS; so we will not be able to offer it in a larger scale and we want to offer it only for complex projects that couldn't be done without such help.
  • We do NOT want to compete with our partners or undersell them.
The Remote Project Consulting and Express Remote Assistance is paid using Consulting Credits that can be bought here. The minimum purchase is 10 credits for $1,000. 1 credit covers 30 minutes.


No Web Development Services

Again, I would like to explain that these services are intended to enhance the options for developers who need assistance and help them deliver complex projects. We will not build web sites, because such services are provided by our partners.


We will appreciate your feedback, so please feel free to post your comments below.

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Petr Palas

I'm the founder and CEO of Kentico. I write about Kentico, WCM, CXM, digital marketing and related technologies.

Comments

Petr Palas commented on

To Marc and Brian: I would like to answer both questions together. Our vision for documentation, support and consulting is following:

1) Create best-in-class documentation - we've recently hired another technical writer and we plan to release documentation updates as we improve it, not just with new versions. Our primary goal is certainly to build documentation that will answer all your questions. This is the most scalable way how to help all of our clients.

2) Create "feature walkthrough" videos that will be useful if you need other members of your team to use Kentico CMS.

3) Develop official Kentico CMS traning.

4) Enhance support to 24x7 and provide a real SLA for support.

5) Provide express support through Express Remote Assistance. This is a premium, paid-for service, but you will still be able to get the same answers through e-mails.

6) Offer consulting on advanced, complex topics. As Marc said, we often answer advanced topics through our support now, but these questions are usually escalated to our development team and then communicated to the client by our support engineers, so the context of the question or some details of the answer may be lost on the way.

With a consultant, you have a single person who will answer your question directly, completely and - if you work with the consultant on an on-going basis - also with knowledge of the context of your project. Even for advanced topics that are easy to answer, you will still get the answer from our support directly. For advanced topics that require deeper understanding of your environment and project and where it makes sense to do a consulting session, you will be able to use our consultant.

Brian commented on

If your documentation was well defined, there should be no need for consulting and would indeed step on your partners toes. I can't count the number of times I've had questions that after spending a couple hours in the documentation trying to figure out how everything is suposed to work, I finally figure out most of the above.

I know you're running a business and need to cover costs but, this is getting rediculous.

Marc Bourgeois commented on

Both offerings seem to be very useful. No problem with the fees, as they shouldn't be lower as those billed by us, the partners. However, I am afraid that more and more topics will be moved from standard support to paid consulting. We have had questions as described in the column "Consulting" in the past, and they have been answered by the support (of course not with the same professionalism as we expect it from the consultants). That's why it seems wiser not to distinguish by type of questions but rather by the quality of the answers. Otherwise, some partners might be disappointed by the service.