Going Electronic #12

Support

One of the most important considerations when you are shopping for software is support. This is particularly true if the software is going to be integrated into many areas of your daily operation - as good maintenance and inventory software should be. You can't afford to put your maintenance system on hold while someone tries to figure out how to sort out a problem they are having. How easy is it going to be to get help when you need it, and how good will it be? Is training offered? Are upgrades to the software available in a timely fashion? And perhaps most importantly, is the developer still going to be supporting it next year, and the year after that.

At AV-Base, we are still supporting customers who refuse to part with the DOS based software we sold them ten years ago. Those people can still call us and talk to a real person who understands both their business and the software they are using. And when they do choose to upgrade to one of the Windows editions of WinAir we now produce, they will get it for a discounted upgrade price.

WinAir users enjoy access to excellent training. We offer regular classes in our London, Ontario facility where individual users can book initial or recurrent training. Classes for the larger editions are structured so that users can attend only the days that cover their areas of interest. We also offer training and implementation assistance at your facility.

Once your staff are trained and the system is up and running, there is a wealth of support literally at their fingertips. Press F1 to activate an extensive Help System that explains every screen in detail.

If users can't find what they are looking for there, they can log into the client area of our web site and have instant access to a searchable Knowledge Base of Tips, Support Notes, Procedures, Frequently Asked Questions, etc.

On those rare occasions when nothing in the Training, or the Help System, or the Knowledge Base can answer your question, you can pick up the phone and talk to us. Chances are, we have specific experience to draw on because there are hundreds of other users out there.

When updates to the program have passed through our quality assurance process, they are posted to our Update Server in London, then your software can be updated right from the menu bar in WinAir. Simply choose Update Center from the Tools menu and enter your administration password. Every workstation on your system will have the most current program files in seconds.

And when a client does phone us to suggest an improvement, or report a difficulty of any kind, we make an entry in our in-house Incident System and assign it a number. Through our web site, clients can then view all the incidents they have reported and see the current status of each. They can even add to it on-line if they wish and our staff will be immediately alerted to the new information.

And finally, rest assured that there are about a dozen full time employees at AV-Base who are making every effort to ensure that the company will be around for a long time to come. Some of us are aviators and some of us are programmers, but we all love what we do and nothing makes us happier than a happy customer.