Where do you post your Support "rules of engagement"

Hi

We'd like to make information available to our customers that will set expectations for their interactions with Support. The info isn't appropriate for any legal doc as it doesn't impact T&Cs. Our product lifecycle page doesn't seem like the right place as it's about dates. I'm thinking of the support portal and I just wanted to see what others are doing.

The type of information I'm looking at posting includes:

EOL products are eligible for limited support that does not include "Follow the Sun" for P1 tickets.

If a customer is in an "air-gapped" environment and we can't access the logs and information required for troubleshooting, our ability to provide an optimal support experience is impaired.

If a customer opens a P1 ticket and doesn't respond to a response via ticket or phone, the priority will automatically be downgraded.

Thanks for your help.

Best Answer

  • ChrisHolm
    ChrisHolm Founding Member | Scholar ✭✭
    Answer ✓

    Thanks for including me, @Patrick Carmitchel , and great question, @Claire Hernandez! We have a link to our EOL matrix on our Customer Center. Our Customer Center has three tabs: Resources, Support, and Tools. The link to it is under the Resources tab. The second and third items you mentioned are good for basic "Information to provide when opening a ticket" type of document. We have these in a Knowledge Article and have links to other basic Knowledge Articles to help users get more familiar interacting with support and we share those with our Community, when onboarding new customers, and other places (to Patrick's note on adding links to other areas outside of the main support one.

    I checked out Puppet's website - it looks really fresh and streamlined, by the way! The 'Get Support' and 'Welcome to Puppet Support' pages look great and are intuitive. As a customer, I would be inclined to look for information in the FAQ link on the 'Welcome to Puppet Support' page.

    I think it would be good to post the information there and the reason why is that the second and third items are sometimes met with disapproval from customers as some perceive those to be a pushback. We all know it is really more about setting expectations so that the experience is heightened by knowledge, but it can be a slippery slope. We try to counter this by having a video on interacting with support (along with documentation) because sometimes a video is seen as more communicative than a "line in the sand document," no matter how good that line is to the overall customer experience!

    Hope this helps!

Answers

  • PatrickCarmitchel
    PatrickCarmitchel TSIA Administrator | admin
    edited March 2021

    Hi @Claire Hernandez, I think you're on the right track with clearly providing access within the support portal. I was checking out Puppet's legal page (see below) and it does have pretty extensive coverage of documentation across typical web T&Cs as well as Product, Support, Professional Services, etc. I would be inclined to also include a pointer to your suggested documentation there as well for optimal visibility.

    @Chris Holm, @Vele Galovski Any thoughts on this?

  • Dave Baca
    Dave Baca Member | Guru ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hi @Claire Hernandez - I think that your desire to establish clear expectations with your customers on how they can receive the most benefit from your support service offerings is spot on. And finding an easy to locate/prominent location on your support portal where you can communicate expectations for customer interactions with Support makes great sense. While I don't have any specific Member examples, I'm hoping the community will be able to provide you with some that will be of help to you.