Table of Contents
4. The Support Request Workflow
- Technical Service Agreement
- Tracking Your Support Requests
- Support Request Resolution Policy
- Participating in Customer Satisfaction Survey
1. Preface
About This Guide
This article is intended for all CloudBlue customers with product-related issues to resolve. This guide is intended to provide a better understanding of how the CloudBlue Support team works to resolve issues in a timely manner and with minimal effort on your part.
About The CloudBlue Support Team
As the face of the company, the CloudBlue Support Team is an integral part in ensuring the success of our customers. We provide exceptional service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We strive to bring high value to our customers in resolving their support and business needs.
The CloudBlue Support Department is a team of highly skilled specialists. We employ about 100 people in different offices across the globe. Together with our customers, we work each day to improve our service. Our technical experience grows through regular product training of CloudBlue products and certification programs for the platforms and operating systems of our products. This allows us to provide solutions based on industry standards, best practices, and certified knowledge you can trust. Our motto is "We can only be as successful as our customers." We take pride in providing our clients with timely, helpful, and efficient support.
CloudBlue Support Specialists
We have the following customer-facing specialists in the CloudBlue Support Team:
- Support Engineers (SE) can help you with any technical product inquiry; perform root cause analysis; or provide workarounds for mission-critical services. When needed, they will route your issue to developers for an efficient solution or workaround.
- Technical Account Manager (TAM) provides proactive support to you and your business; a coordinator familiar with your business and configurations; and finally, your advocate.
2. Free Support Resource
Knowledge Base
CloudBlue Knowledge Base contains known solutions for the most frequent questions and problems. The Knowledge Base is regularly updated with new cases and resources as they become available. It is recommended that Customers check back often for updates.
In the Knowledge Base, you can search for a solution by simply typing a key phrase related to your question or product problem. To create a more defined search, you may want to utilize the drop down menus to be more targeted.
3. Creating Support Requests
Support Request Policies
In this section, you can find information on the incident deduction policy, one-ticket-per-issue policy, support request severities, and support code.
Incident Deducting Policy
If you have a support contract that includes a limited number of incidents, one incident will be deducted from the contract when you create a ticket via our ticketing system or call center.
Once an incident is deducted from your support contract, it cannot be credited back until refund conditions are met.
Important: If the support contract has a limited number of incidents (tickets), the remaining incidents will expire along with the support contract.
One Ticket - One Issue Policy
According to general support rules, our customers should create separate tickets for each individual issue or question. It is often difficult to trace the status of the original problem when various independent requests are mixed in a single thread. The "one ticket - one issue” method helps the support team to process support requests in a more efficient way.
Support Request Severities
Severity level indicates the relative impact of an issue on customer’s systems or business processes. CloudBlue support uses the following guidelines to evaluate the severity of support requests:
- Severity 1 (Urgent): A customer is unable to install and run the software because of problems with a license key, the computer (server) fails to start, or the software crashes and corrupts data. No workaround or immediate solution is available.
- Severity 2 (High): A customer is unable to install and use a program component or a feature described in the documentation. A temporary workaround may be available as CloudBlue attempts to resolve the issue.
- Severity 3 (Normal): A customer is able to use the software; however, there is a partial non-critical loss of functionality of the software.
- Severity 4 (Low): A customer encountered a minor cosmetic issue, errors in the documentation, or asks for information about software usage, enhancements, or modifications.
The detailed severity definitions can be found here.
Important: The selected severity should be reasonable. Support engineers may reduce the severity of the ticket after your confirmation if it does not match the formal definition.
Submitting Support Request
You can submit a support request to CloudBlue Support Team via our web form. Prior to submitting a request, please make sure that you have a valid support code.
After that please proceed to filling in the ticket creation form at https://ticket.cloudblue.com/NewTicket
To reduce resolution time and avoid additional contacts from the Support team to clarify the situation, please provide as much information as you can:
- Issue description itself.
- Current server and network configuration.
- Exact error which appears in the product.
- Exact error which appears in other logs.
- All related log files (System/Event log, mail logs, database logs, apache/IIS logs).
- Screenshots (if needed).
- The exact time the error occurred.
- Any specific information such as user/subscription IDs, affected mailboxes, and/or domain(s).
- Any KB articles that you have already reviewed as part of your troubleshooting process.
- Describe the exact steps for reproducing the issue.
- Describe the latest actions made on the server before the problem had occurred.
- Describe the steps you tried to do to fix the issue.
- When you click Continue you will be redirected to Server Access step where you will be requested to provide the access data so an CloudBlue Support Engineer can login to the affected environment to investigate the reported issue.
Please make sure to provide a valid phone number in order to make the communication most efficient. Select the ticket severity to reflect the issue scale and importance and click Submit to complete the procedure.
Upon submitting the request, you will receive a confirmation e-mail with the request ID assigned to your request, ticket severity, and estimated response time. Please read carefully all the data provided therein. This data will help you in further communications with CloudBlue Support Team.
Important: In all future correspondence regarding your current issue, always include the request ID in the e-mail subject line.
4. The Support Request Workflow
Technical Service Agreement
To be able to solve your issue, Support Representatives might need remote access to your server or control panel. In this case, you need to sign our Technical Service Agreement. By signing this Agreement, you authorize CloudBlue either to start or to continue providing support services.
To sign the Technical Service Agreement, follow these steps:
- Go to https://cscontact.cloudblue.com/spf.
- Fill in all required fields (the ones marked with asterisks). Please read the agreement carefully and provide all necessary information.
Important: Close access to your server/service after your issue has been resolved.
Tracking Your Support Requests
If you place any support request (ticket) to CloudBlue Support Team, you can check status of your request in our request tracking system by yourself. The system also enables you to resolve your tickets. Contact your Technical Account Manager or Service Delivery Manager to request access to the system.
Working With Support Requests in the request tracking Self-Service Portal
In the CloudBlue request tracking Self-Service Portal, you can track your existing tickets and resolve them or review the solutions provided previously.
- Go to https://cloudblue.freshdesk.com/
- Enter your email address and password. In the menu, you will see the following options:
- Home. Recent events or updates.
- Solutions. This is a shortcut to KB search, most recent solutions are also available there.
- Tickets. The page that tracks your tickets. You can filer the tickets by statuses, staff members, and sort by date.
Important: A ticket that has already been closed cannot be reopened.
Support Request Resolution Policy
A support ticket is considered closed in the following cases:
- After you have confirmed that CloudBlue Support Team has resolved the reported issue.
- After CloudBlue provided a solution, and we did not receive any further request for assistance from you within 14 days of the resolution notification.
- If CloudBlue cannot resolve a certain issue or decides not to resolve it with acknowledgement and agreement from your side.
- Problem is a known bug, and a fix release is set for some later micro-update or revision of the product.
Participating in Customer Satisfaction Survey
Our current and future services are based largely on feedback from our customers. In addition, your satisfaction with our services is the only way we measure our success. We conduct customer satisfaction surveys that give you the opportunity to let us know how we are doing.
After we have set the ticket to the Pending by Customer’s confirmation status, you will receive a short e-mail with the link to the online survey form.
Please follow the link and answer a few questions regarding the quality of ticket processing. Your feedback will help us improve our support and increase your success.
The survey form itself is very simple and intuitive.
You may submit the survey in the Self-Service Portal as well.
5. Legal Information
Product Lifecycle Policy
Rapidly changing technologies as well as competitive pressures influence the level, timing, and character of demand for a particular product or group of products. All of this drives the need to introduce new products and services and to EOL older software revisions as well as products.
CloudBlue provides Software support for all Software for (a) the current Release and the greater of (i) the two immediately preceding Releases or (ii) all Releases made available in the 12 months preceding the release of the then current Release.
Once a product has been withdrawn from Marketing, the maintenance coverage will continue to be available up to the End of Support date. Our customers will be notified at contract renewal of any maintenance price changes or support level changes. Formal notification will be made to all maintenance-paying customers of record advising them of the EOS dates. CloudBlue appreciates your business and we hope to continue to serve you in the future.
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KB129999 Plesk Automation End of Life (EOL) Statement
KB130055 H-Sphere 3.x End of Life (EOL) and End of Maintenance (EOM) Statement
KB123028 Helm End of Life (EOL) Statement
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KB130056 Customer and Business Manager End of Life (EOL) Statement