example with software for dental clinics
Most of the time the customers get confused with the term customization and support. Sometime they will think that both are same. This is a highly probable If the customer does not have experience in software purchases. Let’s try to understand the difference between these two terms in the software industry.
Support
Support or Software maintenance is the activity of providing support to the software after the sale. No software is 100% bug free. However, the software with good track record will have only negligible amount of errors. If the customer is taking the software from the start up or a new software from an existing company, the chances of critical bugs are higher. If there is a bug only the concerned developer can help to solve it. So it is always advisable to select the software from a company with a good track record in providing software for your industry.
Let’s take an example of selecting a software for Dental clinics. Dentsoftware is a good example. They have an experience of 10 years in implementing the software for dental clinics across 20 + countries. Since the software has undergone huge number installations, most of the common or critical bugs are fixed. So for any new clinic the software for dental clinic will be literally bug free. Instead if the dentist is selecting a startup software, they are taking a huge risk. There will have risk of software bugs, getting technical support, timely support etc
The issue may arise in two models. From the infrastructure or from the software. The infrastructure consists of Operating system, Hard disk, Network, Databases, Server etc. If any issue happens to infrastructure, the customer has to fix it through their hardware engineers. At the same time if the issue arises from the software like the bugs, data inconsistency, etc, it’s the responsibility of the software vendor and it is scoped under software support.
Addition of client-specific requirements are called customization. Generally, the software will have a set of features available. If we take the example Dentsoftware, its software for dental clinic with excellent features built in. So on a normal case, the client may not require any additions. However, if the client wishes to add any additional feature or changes, it will be scoped under customization. Some of the examples of customization are Change the color of the software, Addition of reports, Change in the work flow, Integrations to devices etc.
Customization
