Guide to reporting issues
So you've launched a subscription with one of our products and ran into an issue or have a question that you couldn't find the answer for on this community. Don't fret - we've got you covered! It's our mission to ensure your support experience is seamless and effortless. If you have access to the Case Portal, you might have noticed a lot of fields on the new case submission page. Why is all of this information necessary / required? We understand that not everything you submit to us will merit this information. For example, if you have a simple request or a question, providing steps to replicate or describing the expected and actual behavior may not be relevant. However, the more information you can provide from the start, the faster your experience will be. For all service requests, whether to report a defect or simply a question, there are some fields that will help us solve for your query more effectively. Subject - Just a brief summary, a tweet if you will, about the request Description - Here's where your novel goes, with the entirety of the request Customer Priority - By default, this is "normal" but sometimes there's a High or Low priority request. These should be compared to your others, meaning 90% of your request would typically be "Normal" in priority. Severity - These are contractual levels, but take a look at our Support Page for some definitions. This is a field you can't change once submitted, but our support team can if appropriate. When reporting a defect or issue to Khoros Support, please provide the following information: URL of Khoros Product and/or URL(s) of where the problem occurs Steps to Reproduce Expected Behavior Actual Behavior Browser and OS Username, Roles, or Ranks When asking a question or making a request to Khoros Support, please provide the following information: Subject Description / Request / Question URL of Khoros Product Providing the above will eliminate the chance for any confusion or unnecessary back-and-forth that may lengthen the time your case stays open. On a final note, a picture is worth a thousand words - if you're able to attach screenshots to your case submission, it will be extremely helpful to the team in getting your case moved along even faster. And if a picture is worth a thousand words... a video is worth a million! If the issue you're experiencing is intermittent or rather involved, capture it on a quick video. There are several applications out there that offer video capturing of your screen - Jing is a great free tool to try and works on both PC and Mac.Khoros Care Downtime & Impacts to Bot Customers
At times, Khoros will perform scheduled maintenance on your Khoros Care instance. You will receive an email notification for the maintenance approximately 3 days beforehand. This email will contain the date, time, and length of the maintenance. Note your specific date and time from the email Khoros maintenance windows are designed so that any downtime maintenance we perform is done during times that are least impactful to your Khoros Care teams and your customers. You should plan for up to an hour of downtime where agents won't be able to sign in to your Khoros Care instance. Review the maintenance windows. For most of our customers, this impact is minimal and potentially completely invisible to your customers. For a very small group of our bot customers, the downtime could translate to an impact to bot interactions if your bot is connected to the Care API to retrieve messages vs. network APIs directly. The former may mean that your customers won't receive messages from your bot during the downtime and won't receive messages afterward unless they re-engage again subsequently. This can also have an impact on the continuation of bot flows that started before the downtime that got interrupted. Those customers may experience a restart of their conversation journey with the bot, such as a bot response that ignores the context the customer already provided. To minimize the disruption now, consider one of these options: Welcome Response message Bot Holding Work Queue Welcome Response message Set a Welcome Response message in Care for the affected bot channels 1 hour before the downtime, informing customers they might experience a disrupted bot journey. This will trigger a Welcome Response as well as starting the bot journey. Don’t forget to disable this new Welcome Response after the downtime. Alternatively, you could update the welcome bot flow directly within Flow, and then remove it after the downtime. Here’s a sample message: "As we make security improvements to our servers, the bot may be impacted over the next couple of hours. If the bot fails to respond to you, please simply re-engage with us after 1 hour to continue the conversation. We apologize for the impact this may have." Bot Holding Work Queue If customers don't re-engage the bot after the downtime, you might have to take conversations out of your bot holding queue and deliver them to agents without waiting for automatic agent handoff by the bot. Follow this guide to achieve this. Note: If you use bots other than Khoros Flow, confirm with your bot provider how a downtime of Khoros Care might affect you. The steps above should also be of value to you. If you have any concerns or questions regarding this, raise them with your Account team. If you don't know who they are, simply ask Maia, our chatbot, on Atlas 'CSM' and they will let you know who you can speak to. Also, don't forget that our Support Team works 24/7/365 in urgent cases.Working with Khoros during Major Events
We know that there are events that specific communities consider "major" for their business -- whether this is the Superbowl , Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a live event, a new product launch, a relaunch of your design, a demo for executives, or any one of a dozen other scenarios, it is our goal to work with you to ensure that events are as seamless as possible. Outages Khoros is committed to ensuring that you are supported 24/7/365 on any outages. We have a comprehensive guide to outages and information about our general status page available for you to take a look at, but the summary of this is that if you or your customer's are down or unable to work, let us know and we'll quickly take a look to see what's going on! You can always keep up to date on our status page where we do our best to provide insight to outages impacting multiple customers. Being Proactive Assuming you know ahead of time that you have a major event coming up, please let us know as early as possible - at least a week - if not more - is ideal! Although we have monitoring in place to help mitigate issues as best as possible, the best situation is where we can proactively review allocated resources, your server side setup, and make sure that there simply aren't any issues! Reaching Out If you have a Technical Account Manager or CSM, please make sure that they and Support are aware of your impending event so that they can pay attention to it. If you don't, don't despair! Open a support case letting our team know that you have an event coming, what the date and time of it is and that you'd like us to take a look to see if there's anything that needs to be done to help prevent an impact on you or your customers. If you can add Proactive to the case subject, it'll help us organize the solution as well. Depending on need and contracted level of support, this may require some additional conversations to figure out what is necessary to help you be successful. The above applies to whether you're a Care, Communities, Marketing, or JX customer!Can Technical Writers Exist in an Agile Dev Team?
Whether you're creating a simple UI-based tool for customers without any technical experience or an API with complex parameters that pose a challenge to even the most experienced developers, a technical writer bridges the information gap between your development team and the end-user.
