Customer Support In The Era of Continuous Deployment: A Software-Intensive Embedded Systems Case Study

Supporting customers after they acquire the product is essential for companies producing and selling software-intensive embedded systems products. Generally, customer support is the first interaction point between the product users and the product vendor. Customer support is often engaged with answering customers' questions, troubleshooting, fault identification, and fixing product faults. While continuous deployment advocates for closer cooperation between the ones operating the software and the ones developing it, the means of such collaboration in general and the role of customer support, in particular, has not been addressed in the context of software-intensive embedded systems. Therefore, to better understand the impact that continuous deployment has on customer support and the role customer support should play in this context, we conducted a case study at a multinational company developing and selling telecommunications networks infrastructure. We focused on the 4th and 5th Generation (4G and 5G) Radio Access Networks (RAN) products, which can be considered a high volume product as they cover more than 80% of the world's population. Our study reveals that customer support needs to transition from a transaction-based and passive function triggered by customer support requests, to take an active role characterized by being proactive and preemptive to cope with the shorter operational time of a software version introduced by continuous deployment. In addition, customer support plays an essential role in making the feedback actionable by aggregating and consolidating feedback data to the R&D organization.