Software Potential Support SLA

Software Potential Support Service Level Agreement

Last Updated: February 20th 2012

This is a Technical Support Service Level Agreement ("Support SLA") between InishTech and its customers. This agreement details the nature and the parameters of the technical support services provided to customers of the Software Potential service offering as they are mutually understood and agreed to by InishTech and its customers.

Objectives

The purpose of this Agreement is to ensure that the proper considerations, processes and procedures are in place to enable the provision of consistent high quality, responsive technical support to InishTech customers.

The objectives of this Agreement are as follows:

  • Provide clear reference to service ownership, accountability, roles and/or responsibilities.
  • Present a clear, concise and measurable description of service provision to the customer.
  • Match perceptions of expected service provision with actual service support & delivery.

Service Scope

The following support services are offered under this Agreement:

  • Online support via Forums, Knowledge Base(s), FAQ repositories;
  • Online Ticket Management system;
  • Monitored email support;
  • Manned telephone support (where applicable);
  • Remote assistance using Remote Desktop and a Virtual Private Network (where available)

The following services are excluded:

  • Planned or Emergency Onsite assistance

Customer Definition

Technical support services are provided for current InishTech customers only, and this Service SLA applies to them and them only. Identical technical support services are typically extended to individuals conducting a “free 30 day trial” of the InishTech service, for the duration of that trial period; however InishTech makes no commitments to provide any technical support in respect of non-customers, and reserves the right to withdraw support from non-customers without notice.

Support Channels

Online Support

InishTech provides a comprehensive range of online support resources to customers via our support website and through our resource centre that is accessible from InishTech’s main website:
Product & service information – documents, videos, blogs, articles, tutorials, How-to Guides etc. – ranging from high level explanatory material, to business and commercial material & technical material.
Support Knowledge Base – an information repository, containing KB articles and a comprehensive FAQ that address all of the most common user-related queries.
Online Forums - In addition a range of technical forums are provided where customers can raise issues for the attention of the broader InishTech user community and open a direct dialogue with InishTech technical support staff.
Private Online Forums - A range of closed forums reserved for customers, individual customers, or customer groups are also provided.

Email Support

InishTech provides monitored email support via our support alias support@inishtech.com. We encourage customers to use the online resources first and reserve email support for less urgent issues.

Phone Support

InishTech does not provide manned phone support as standard under this Support SLA. There are certain customers to whom we extend limited manned phone support including remote assistance. If you wish to be considered for phone support, please send a request sales@inishtech.com

Support Requests: Severity Definitions

InishTech target response times and actions taken to resolve client support requests are based on an assessment of the impact of the reported technical issue on your business. The more serious the business impact, the higher the assigned priority. In responding to a customer's support request, the priority level is established and assigned according to the following taxonomy:

Priority 1

Definition – Service is unavailable. Critical business impact due to customer’s inability to access the Software Potential service. This condition requires immediate resolution.
Conditions - Service unavailable, preventing a customer from accessing critical functionality. This results in a serious interruption to a customer’s business operations. It has affected, or could affect, all users. Tasks that should be executed immediately cannot be executed because of lack of availability of the service or interruptions in main functions of the service.

Priority 2

Definition – Service is available but is severely limited in terms of functionality and usability, due to performance issues or errors in expected behaviour.
Conditions - An application error has occurred which does not prevent operation of the service but might severely hamper normal operations e.g. failure in expected behaviour or performance degradation. The error is attributed to malfunctioning or incorrect behavior of the service.  

Priority 3

Definition - Minor business impact which indicates the service is usable with some less significant features (not critical to operations) unavailable.
Conditions - A minor issue that results in minimal or no interruptions to normal current operations resulting in no immediate business impact.  It may affect customer’s ability to meet near term deadlines.

Priority 4

Definition - Negligible business impact where the issue results in little impact on current customer operations.
Conditions - The issue consists of "how to" questions including issues related to APIs and integration, installation and configuration inquiries, enhancement requests, or documentation questions.

Support Requests: Response Procedure

All support requests (online, forum, email, phone etc.) submitted will be assigned a priority level and dealt with according to the following schedule:

Priority 1 Issue

Approach:  Responding to a Priority 1 issue involves reacting to a customer’s emergency situation by applying suitable resources immediately to resolve the issue. Priority 1 issues will, unless otherwise agreed upon with the customer, be serviced on a continual effort basis until the Priority 1 condition has been resolved. It is to be understood that the resolution to Priority 1 conditions may come in a variety of forms, including temporary relief, that is viable in enabling the customer’s business to operate until a more comprehensive solution is provided.

In the case of a customer request that gets assigned P1 status, initial response is made within 15 minutes. On-going communication is per hour until the case is resolved or lowered to a Priority 2 by agreement with the customer.
Communications: The following will be the communications with customers in the event of a Priority 1 incident:

  • In the case of a service interruption, within 15 minutes of incident: customer notification of the service interruption via RSS and Twitter feeds
  • Within 60 minutes of incident and every hour thereafter: customer update on RSS & Twitter
  • On Resolution:  customer notification on RSS and Twitter feeds
  • Within 5 days of the resolution:  Customer email notification of root cause etc.

Priority 2 Issue

Approach: Priority 2 issues will be serviced as critical during normal InishTech business hours (as defined in this SLA) until the Priority 2 condition has been resolved, unless an alternative customer agreement exists. Rapid resolution should be provided using best effort.
Response Times: Initial response must be made within 1 hour of a Priority 2 case notification being received by InishTech. On-going response is based on what is agreed to with the customer. A one to ten day status is used as a guideline.

Priority 3 Issue

Approach: Priority 3 issues will be serviced as having high importance to both the customer and customer services. Such issues will be progressed during normal business hours until the Priority 3 condition has been resolved.
Response Times: Initial response must be made within 1 hour of a Priority 3 case notification being received by InishTech. On-going response is based on what is agreed to with the customer. A one to ten day status is used as a guideline.

Priority 4 Issue

Approach: Priority 4 issues will be serviced as general issues during normal business hours until the Priority 4 condition has been resolved.
Response Times: Initial response must be made within 1 hour of a Priority 4 case. On-going response is based on what is agreed to with the customer. A one to ten day status is used as a guideline. A formal status may not be required if the issue is in a wait condition (i.e. waiting on a fix, waiting for a recreate, etc).

Service Availability

Standard support

Available to InishTech customers during the following hours:

  • Monday - Friday: 09.00 to 17.00 UTC
  • Weekends: Not Available

This excludes major holidays as listed below.

Emergency support

Available to deal specifically with service outages as follows:

  • Monday – Friday: 17.00 to 22.00 UTC
  • Weekends: 0900 to 22.00 UTC
  • Public Holidays: 09.00 to 22.00 UTC

Holidays

Standard support is unavailable during the following public holidays. Emergency support is available.

  • Christmas, December 25th, 26th
  • New Year’s Eve, December 31st
  • New Year’s Day, January 1
  • Easter (Dates vary)
  • May 1st (May Day Holiday)
  • October Bank Holiday weekend (Dates flexible)

Customer Requirements

  • The following customer requirements apply to avail of support:
  • Have an active commercial Software Potential account
  • Be eligible for customer support assistance
  • Submit the support issue by one of the following mechanism
    • Online via Discussion forums
    • Via email to support@inishtech.com
    • Via a support ticket request (ticket system currently under development)
  • Ensure support request:
    • States runtime version of Software Potential Agent
    • Includes screen shot, URL, explanation of how to reproduce the problem
    One request per ticket (Excessive requests in one ticket will be closed immediately)
  • Be in a position to provide required responses to requests from InishTech support

Closure of Issues

Issues will only be closed with the agreement of the customer who raised the issue. However, issues which are awaiting a reply from a customer will be closed after 7 days during which a reply has not been received.  InishTech will assume, since the ticket was not responded to, that the issue has been resolved. If assistance is still needed, please submit a new request.