Support tiers, response-time SLAs, and ticket handling for the TQ Data Foundation.
TopQuadrant offers three different tiers of technical support, Basic, Premium and Platinum, to accommodate customers from small businesses to large Fortune 500 enterprises across basic to advance use cases and needs. Assistance is available through the Jira Support Portal where our Technical Support team can help in diagnosing, troubleshooting, and resolving issues for TQ Data Foundation.
TopQuadrant Support identifies, prioritizes, and responds to tickets based on the severity of the ticket and the support tier of the reporting customer. Response time is tracked during the standard support hours of 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern (UTC – 5), Monday through Friday, except major holidays. Following initial analysis of the issue, every support request is evaluated according to the class of error, processing time, and error correction.
The Support Portal is available at http://servicedesk.topquadrant.com/ and while access is controlled by TopQuadrant, the accounts are self-managed after creation. To create an account, support needs the email address(s) of the user(s). The number of accounts available is determined by the purchased plan. After the accounts are created, users can update their display name, reset passwords, and view previously created tickets without the need for assistance from support personnel. Interaction with support agents takes place through these tickets. Tickets should be scoped to individual issues and the issue should be explained – and relevant files, logs and reproducible steps should be included – so that assistance may be expedited.
When tickets are created, the opening party will receive a confirmation email. Updates by the support team will be added to this email thread, and responses to the thread will be added to the ticket. If responding to these automatic emailsPlease follow the instructions regarding responses to the automatic emails and if possible disable any additional signatures or messages in responses to help prevent clutter on the ticket. Please note that any responses to the thread by personnel that don’t have support portal accounts will not be added to the ticket.
Tickets have states based on which party (Support, customer, other TQ departments) has a required action and these are visible to all parties in the portal. These are Waiting for Support, Waiting for Customer, TQ Review, Customer Review. When a ticket is first opened, it progresses through some analysis stages (Triage and SLA Setting) where the support tier, deployment method, support status, and other variables are determined and assigned to the ticket, and then it enters the Waiting for Support stage. This usually only takes a few seconds. In some cases automated messages are added to the ticket containing information regarding the request.
When an agent from the support team initially responds to a ticket, the response SLA timer is paused. When support responds to a ticket, there are two outcomes. If the support team still has a pertinent action, the ticket will remain in Waiting for Support, otherwise, responses by the support team move the ticket to Waiting for Customer. If a ticket remains in the Waiting for Customer status for 5 days, an automated warning message is sent to check in on the issue, after 7 days with no response tickets are automatically closed. A customer response on a ticket will move it from Waiting for Customer to Waiting for Support and reset the 5 or 7 day automation. Tickets may also be closed manually by the support team upon resolution of the issue.
If a ticket will require in-depth review by either the customer or another team at TopQuadrant (such as development, or professional services), the ticket is moved into the appropriate TQ Review or Customer Review status which will prevent the ticket from being closed by the automation (although there are still automated check-ins).
Closed tickets that have a response added by a customer are automatically reopened. Should a ticket be reopened – either manually by either customer or a support agent, or through a response on the ticket – the response SLAs are not recalculated; Only new tickets receive the SLA assignment.
