What should you do when your customer faces a critical product issue

Dear Partners,

At Boyum Solutions we are committed to delivering excellent support to all our customers and partners.

However, it’s inevitable that situations will arise where a customer faces an interruption in service.

If you feel that it’s necessary to escalate a support ticket, our technical team is here to help you resolve the issue swiftly and efficiently. Our established escalation process has been put in place to keep you updated on the status of your escalated ticket every step of the way.

The first step in the escalation process is your original support ticket. We will evaluate the situation, investigate the issue and resolve it as quickly as possible. Please note that for an issue to be escalated, a support ticket must be created - we will not initiate escalations based solely on communications via email. All communication between the support and ticket owner should be documented within the ticket.

We would like to share this process with you so you know what to expect when you’re involved in an escalation:

First Step: Define whether the issue is actually ‘Urgent’?

We must first prioritize the ticket correctly. A ticket that requires escalation can be defined by the following statement:

Tickets should be marked as ‘Urgent’ if the issue has a serious impact on normal business processes, or on IT processes relating to core business processes. Crucial work cannot be performed.

This is generally caused by the following circumstances: 

1. A productive system is completely down / stand still.
2. The imminent (today / tomorrow) system go-live or upgrade of a production system can't be completed.
3. The customer's core business processes are seriously affected in a live environment.

In such cases the ticket will be escalated immediately. 

When this is the case, please be sure to provide us with all such information, as well as any other details that might help us to resolve the issue. When we get a ticket which is either categorized as ‘Urgent’ or has an escalation request against it, we will ask you the following questions:

• Is there an acceptable workaround?
• Is core business functionality severely affected?
• What is the anticipated financial loss to the business due to the issue in question?
• How many users are affected?
• How does this issue affect the Go-Live date (if applicable)?
• Please include all forms of contact for the person who will be working on the incident (work/mobile phone, email) along with hours of availability.

If the prerequisites above do not apply to your customer’s situation then we will confirm this and process the ticket as ‘High Priority’.

2^nd Step: How to handle an ‘Urgent’ ticket?

If Step 1 results in your ticket being categorized as ‘Urgent’, we will ask you for the following to ensure that it is dealt with as swiftly as possible:

• Remote access to the relevant system. 
• A designated contact person to open the system, with guaranteed availability and required login data
• A contact person must be available to provide information about the issue.
• The must be described in as much detail as possible, including instructions on how to recreate the problem if this information was not part of the original message

If a ticket features more than one problem, please be sure to split the ticket so the urgent issue appears in a dedicated ticket. 

3^rd Step: Remote session with the partner

Assuming that it helps to resolve the ticket, as soon as it has been categorized as ‘Urgent’ we will schedule a remote session to review the issue.

4^th Step: Status update

If the issue was not resolved in Step 3, you will receive a status update in the ticket with our plan of action

Ongoing: The ticket will remain as ‘Urgent’ until it is resolved.

5^th step: Final resolution / De-escalation

Once resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, if necessary the ticket will be monitored for an agreed period. The support team remains on standby should the problem recur during the monitoring period.

Once the monitoring period has passed, upon agreement with you the ticket will be closed by the Escalation Manager.