What can you expect from Virtalis customer support?
Introduction
Virtalis customer support services help you to make the most out of your investment in our technology. We aim to address your needs quickly and professionally, either by directly assisting in a support capacity, or by putting you in contact with the most appropriate Virtalis team member who can help you.
As part of your ongoing support and maintenance contract, you receive the following benefits:
- Telephone and email access to skilled support engineers
- Remote assistance
- Access to the latest software releases and regular software updates
Hours
Support staff are usually available during normal business hours (8am - 5pm).
You can contact us via email at support@virtalis.com or by phone. If you need to contact us outside of normal business hours we recommend that you use the support email address and someone will follow up on your case as soon as possible.
Severity
When you contact us, the support agent will work with you to establish the severity of your case
Severity
Description
Critical
- Malfunction of business-critical operations
- Software defects with no workaround that block major functionality
High
- System instability causing periodic interruptions
- Software defects for which there are only short-term workarounds
Medium
- Software defects which have workarounds available.
- Non-critical issues
Low
- General usage help
- Minor or cosmetic issues
- Minor documentation clarification
- Suggestions for future enhancements
Support Information Required
When you contact us for support, we require as much information as possible in order to provide the most effective service. This includes
- What is the task you are trying to accomplish?
- What is the context and business impact?
- What steps are you taking to achieve the task?
- Which part do you need help with?
- Are there any screenshots or videos you can provide to aid in understanding?
- Can you provide the application log files and configuration files?
- For data related issues, are you able to provide a sample of the data you need help with?
Workflow
- If you encounter an issue or require any assistance, the best way to contact us is via our support desk email - support@virtalis.com - attaching as much of the required support information as possible.
- This will create a help-desk ticket automatically and allow us to keep track of your issue and guide it to an acceptable outcome.
You may also telephone us directly, however this may result in a delay in your issue being logged if all of our support agents are busy on other calls. - You will receive an automatic response confirming your request and providing you with a ticket ID which you can use if you need to speak to us via other channels
- Once your issue has been logged, a support agent will take ownership of your issue and respond to let you know they have done so. They may request further information or clarification from you, such as additional logs or where possible, data to help them diagnose the issue.
- The support agent will communicate possible resolutions to you via email, and may also wish to set up a call for further troubleshooting
When communicating via email it is important to reply directly to the emails that came from the support system, so that all communication is attached to the original support case
Scope
We do our best to address all customer support cases effectively and meet your expectations of our service. This table describes the different categories that a support case can fall into and provides details of what you can expect from us. When your case falls outside of the scope of the respective category, we also suggest additional services that can provide you with the assistance you need.
Category
Scope of Support
Additional Services / Requirements
"How do I?"
Support aims to assist with answers to general questions around product usage and best practices, and where appropriate provide references to tutorials, guides, and other supporting documentation.
Questions involving significant focused assistance or full-scale enterprise roll-outs require professional services
Product Functionality
Support aims to assist with information about features, best practices, and where necessary can facilitate submission of feature requests to R&D.
Questions involving significant assistance to a level that can be considered training require a training package
Product Defect
Support aims to assist with triage and qualification of issues, identifying severity, providing workarounds where possible and submitting the issues to R&D for fix in future releases
Product Performance
Support aims to assist with triage and qualification of issues, providing information about best practices and data optimisation, and where issues are identified and reproducible, submitting to R&D. We are unable to directly assist with data optimisation in third party products such as CAD packages.
Product Documentation
Support aims to assist with clear information or corrections to documentation where necessary.
Custom scripts
Support aims to assist with clarification to expected behaviour of scene events and associated API functions, small scripts that display an issue, as well as general best-practice suggestions for using the scene events system. We are unable to debug or fix issues in large complex scenes which are not authored by Virtalis, which includes scripts interacting with other customer systems and infrastructure.
Assistance with writing complex scripts for integrating Virtalis software with customer systems can be obtained by professional services
Custom plugins / integrations
Support aims to assist with clarification to expected behaviour of application plugins using our plugin APIs, as well as suggest best-practice approaches to their development. We are unable to debug or fix entire plugins or assist heavily in their creation.
Assistance with writing application plugins can be obtained by professional services
Product Roadmap
If requested, your Sales representative or Customer Success Manager would be happy to arrange a product roadmap discussion with our Product Manager
Product Training
We are unable to provide direct product training
Please contact your sales representative to enquire about training packages
Outcomes
Support tickets can be marked as "Resolved" when they reach an acceptable outcome. We have defined the acceptable outcomes for each category in the table below.
Category
Acceptable Outcomes
Product Functionality
- Clarified the expected behaviour of the feature in question
- Documented best-practice solutions ("how-to")
- Submitted feature request, qualified and accepted by the development team for upcoming release
- Submitted feature request, qualified and accepted onto the development backlog but not yet committed for upcoming release
- Submitted feature request, investigated by development team and identified as 'will not implement'
Product Defect
- Provided a suitable and reliable workaround, but will not be addressed further by the development team
- Verified and submitted bug accepted by the development team for upcoming release
- Verified and submitted bug in the development backlog but not yet committed for upcoming release
Product Performance
- Provided best-practice information to support optimisation (e.g. help tweaking importer settings)
- Provided details for upgrading to the latest version of the software
- Other outcomes as per Product Defect
Product Documentation
- Clarification or correction to information in product documentation
- Correction of documentation where possible
- Submitted documentation bug in R&D backlog
Customer Inactivity
- Cases in "waiting for customer" status for 7 days may be closed. You may respond to closed issues with further information which will automatically reopen them
Tips
- Do your best to provide as much information as possible to your support agent. The more information that is provided the easier it is for the issue to find the right person.
- Keep up to date with software changes by reading the release notes and change logs
- If you require further clarification about any information given to you by our support staff, please ask