Support Ticket Priorities & Service Level Agreements Defined
This document defines the priorities used by the iCarol Support Team when handling tickets. Please note the following when submitting tickets to the iCarol Support Team:
- The iCarol Engineering team monitors iCarol applications and services 7/24/365 and begins work immediately upon automated notification of outages. Major outages are extremely rare, but when they occur, the "Communications During an Unplanned Outage" plan detailed below is followed
- The iCarol Support team will determine the business impact of the reported issue, which may change the ticket Priority
- The 'Client Priority' and 'Priority' may differ, as the iCarol Support Team 'Priority' is based on the definitions in this document
- To help the iCarol Support Team identify the 'Client Priority', please submit all Tickets from the Help Center when logged into your iCarol system
- Click here for more information about Standard Support in iCarol, including hours and ways to contact the Support Team, and to learn more about available Premier Support packages
Urgent (Critical business impact)
Urgent priority indicates that the customer is unable to use the iCarol application, resulting in a critical impact on business operations. Issues at this priority require immediate resolution.
Examples of Urgent issues:
- The iCarol application is down and not accessible by anyone
- Multiple users cannot access the iCarol application
- Multiple users unable to provide services using key areas of iCarol, including:
- Create/submit Contact Records
- Create/edit ANY Resource (issues with single records is not urgent)
- Search or make Referrals to Resources
- Search submitted Contact Records
- Public-facing features such as the Public Resource Directory, Messaging, API, or Online Forms are down and not accessible by any public users
- Performance of the iCarol application has degraded to an unusable level
- Data is unrecoverable, corrupt, or lost
Examples of issues that are not typically classified as Urgent:
- iCarol is operational following a one–time outage
- Feature Request or customization
- Requests for information
- Issues affecting non-key feature areas such as Shifts, Vol-Staff, Chatboard, News, Events, etc.
- Customer is not available for collaboration with support engineers after hours
- First–time installation
- If there is a work around for the issue
Key Deliverables:
- Urgent service involves responding to the customer’s emergency situation initially within 2-hour during regular support hours by offering a resolution or assigning additional iCarol resources
- Urgent issues will be serviced on a continual effort basis until the Urgent condition has a resolution
- Resolution of Urgent conditions may include temporary relief or workaround, enabling the customer’s business to operate until a more comprehensive solution is provided
Urgent service delivery requires the:
- Customer to have an active iCarol subscription in good standing
- Customer to be available 24x7 to actively collaborate with iCarol Support and/or Technology teams as needed
If the customer breaks continual effort, the situation will no longer be classified as critical, and will become lower priority. The case will then be serviced during normal business hours.
Note: The iCarol Engineering team monitors iCarol applications and services 7/24/365 and begins work immediately upon automated notification of outages. Major outages are extremely rare.
Note: The iCarol Support team will determine the business impact of the reported issue, which may change the ticket Priority.
High (Significant Business Impact)
High priority indicates iCarol is usable but severely limited.
Examples:
- Issues affecting multiple users with high negative impact (eg. Shift notifications not being sent, messaging popups and notifications,)
- Public-facing Email's not being sent (AVR, Referral)
- Not sending custom reports
- Configuration change/setup of feature associated to new the setup of new subscription features (eg. Configure online form, chat logo, chat css, apply programs to historical contacts, 211 counts, etc.)
- Custom Project requests including new features and data migrations (imports/exports)
- Issues affecting reporting including the provision of export files and use of statistics charts
Key Deliverables:
- High priority service involves responding to the customer’s situation initially within 24-hours during regular support hours by offering a resolution or assigning additional iCarol resources.
- High priority issues will be serviced on a continual effort basis until the High priority condition has a resolution.
- Resolution of High priority conditions may include temporary relief or workaround, enabling the customer’s business to operate until a more comprehensive solution is provided.
High Priority service delivery requires the:
- Customer to have an active iCarol subscription in good standing
- Customer to be available to actively collaborate with iCarol Support and/or Technology teams as needed
Note: The iCarol Engineering team monitors iCarol applications and services 7/24/365 and begins work immediately upon automated notification of outages. Major outages are extremely rare.
Note: The iCarol Support team will determine the business impact of the reported issue, which may change the ticket Priority.
Medium (Limited Business Impact)
Medium priority indicates iCarol is usable, but that some features are unavailable or not working as expected and impacting business operations.
Examples:
- Requests for information including Training and how-to's questions
- Taxonomy update inquiries
- Shifts, vol-staff, chat board, news, events features not working as expected
- Setting changes requiring support assistance
- Updates to geographic values
- Deletion of data requests (eg. shifts)
Key Deliverables:
- Medium priority service involves responding to the customer’s situation initially within 48-hours during regular support hours by offering a resolution or assigning additional iCarol resources.
- Medium priority issues will be serviced on a continual effort basis until the Medium priority condition has a resolution.
- Resolution of Medium priority conditions may include temporary relief or workaround, enabling the customer’s business to operate until a more comprehensive solution is provided.
Medium priority service delivery requires the:
- Customer to have an active iCarol subscription in good standing
- Customer to be available to actively collaborate with iCarol Support and/or Technology teams as needed
Note: The iCarol Engineering team monitors iCarol applications and services 7/24/365 and begins work immediately upon automated notification of outages. Major outages are extremely rare.
Note: The iCarol Support team will determine the business impact of the reported issue, which may change the ticket Priority.
Low (Minimal Business Impact)
Low priority indicates problem doesn’t significantly impact operations, or that a usable workaround has been implemented.
Examples:
- Spelling mistakes
- Cosmetic bugs/issues
Key Deliverables:
- Low priority service involves responding to the customer’s situation initially within 48-hours during regular support hours by offering a resolution or assigning additional iCarol resources.
- Low priority issues will be serviced on a continual effort basis until the Low priority condition has a resolution.
- Resolution of Low priority conditions may include temporary relief or workaround, enabling the customer’s business to operate until a more comprehensive solution is provided.
Low Priority service delivery requires the:
- Customer to have an active iCarol subscription in good standing
- Customer to be available to actively collaborate with iCarol Support and/or Technology teams as needed
Note: The iCarol Engineering team monitors iCarol applications and services 7/24/365 and begins work immediately upon automated notification of outages. Major outages are extremely rare.
Note: The iCarol Support team will determine the business impact of the reported issue, which may change the ticket Priority.
Communications During An Unplanned Outage
When unplanned outages occur, which would fall under the Urgent priority, below is our communication plan to keep customers informed:
- As soon as we have validated the full or partial outage, we will send out an email communication through our "System alerts and notifications" email list to inform you we are aware of and working on the issue.
- In the case of a full outage, if the outage is not resolved within 30 minutes, an email update will be provided every 30 mins until resolved.
- In the case of a partial outage when iCarol is still accessible but specific features may be unavailable, we will post system alerts within iCarol until resolved.
- We will send an additional communication when the iCarol services are restored, as well as update the system alert in iCarol.
- Once the root cause of the issues is determined, we will send a final communication to share more about the cause of the issue and steps we’re taking to prevent it from happening again in the future.
We understand how crucial it is that you have access to your iCarol system, and we assure you we take any outage very seriously and are always working hard to prevent these disruptions from occurring.