Escalating Support Cases
Some tips before escalating In the case portal, you have the ability to set/change the "Customer Priority" field between low, normal and high. When issues are urgent but not necessarily world ending, changing the priority to "high" will push it up the list of issues based on your support level, which is a good way to get support's attention to an issue. One thing to avoid if possible is creating a case and escalating it that same day without a strong reason. Same day escalations are generally pushed back on to allow them to go through the standard support triage process and gather all necessary information before bringing in other experts or teams, but short-cutting tends to be disruptive to that process and introduces further delays. While it is important to stay in close contact with your CSM or account rep, we strongly recommend bypassing them for escalations and instead escalating directly via the case portal. Ad-hoc escalations create back channels and can duplicate efforts, which has resulted in delays or confusion around escalations. CSM's are also informed around escalations automatically, so they will be aware. When should I escalate? You should escalate when there is urgency involved in a support ticket. This would include issues such as, but not limited to: Time constraints (SSL cert expiring, deadlines, events, etc.) A major impaired function that does not qualify as an severity 1 issue SLA missed for first response Unresponsive or lack of updates in a case While we'll do our best to keep it to a minimum, there will be times when escalated issues will not be accepted as an escalation. If/when that happens, an automated reply will be sent to inform the user who originally escalated the case. Decisions around escalations are entirely at the discretion of the team responsible for escalations. Additionally, the escalation feature is not designed to replace the outage alias. Any issue which qualifies as being of outage severity should continue to go through the standard outage process of emailing outage@lithium.com or setting the case severity to "1". When can I escalate? All Severity 1 cases (outages) are automatically escalated to our Mission Critical Support team and thus do not require further escalation. Cases that were submitted with a lower severity rating can be escalated four (4) hours after the original submission. Can I escalate outages? All severity 1 issues are considered outage level and it's not necessary to escalate since an on-call team is available 24/7/365 for issues that qualify. S1 cases are already at the highest and most visible level possible. How do I escalate a support case? Aftera case has been created, the option to escalate it will be available. Simply open the desired support ticket within the Case Portaland click Escalate Caselocated in the escalation information section. Anew form displays along with some details and instructions. On that form, provide a summary of why the case needs to be escalated to an Escalation Manager for review within 4 business hours. After you've filled out the escalation summary and submitted the request, an alert is sent to an Escalation Manager for review. An Escalation Manager will review the request and reply directly in the case you escalated with a decision or plan of action. What if I'm not satisfied with the current escalation decision or progress? Should you be unsatisfied with the results of your case escalation, you have the option to go up a higher level by clicking the "Escalate Case" button again. When the "Escalate Case" button is used again, you'll be presented with a different form acknowledging the next-level escalation and again requesting you provide an explanation around the reason for escalating again / higher. Once submitted, an Escalation Manager will review the request and respond directly within the escalated case. You can perform this process multiple times. The higher the escalation, the more members of Leadership or Management will be involved. Here's a breakdown of the various levels and what occurs: Level 1: The case is escalated to our senior support engineers, team leads and managers. Level 2: All of the previous team is alerted, but the escalation is extended to senior managers, directors and your account's Customer Success Manager (CSM). Level 3: All of the previous manager groups from Level 2 are alerted, but in addition, the Senior Director of Global Technical Support will be included. A full analysis will be completed to understand why this case needed an escalation to this level. Level 4: All of the managers from Level 3 are alerted, but our VP of Support is also alerted and will take personal responsibility to drive through to completion.Khoros Support Hours & Observed Holidays
Hours of Operation On Severity 1 Service Incidents, Khoros hours of operation are 24/7/365. For all others, standard hours of operation for Khoros Support are as follows (Monday - Friday): Region Hours (Regional) Hours (PST) Americas 6 AM – 6 PM PST 6 AM – 6 PM PST EMEA 7 AM – 6 PM GMT 11 PM - 10 AM PST APAC 7 AM – 4 PM IST 5:30 PM – 2:30 AM PST Additional hours of operation are available with additional support levels or on some grandfathered agreements. Coverage for major holidays, as defined by Khoros regional support, is limited to Severity 1 issues only. Observed Holidays for 2024 Americas New Year’s Day (observed) January 1 Martin Luther King Jr. Day January 15 President’s Day February 19 Spring Holiday March 29 Memorial Day May 27 Juneteenth (observed) June 19 Independence Day July 4 Labor Day September 2 Thanksgiving Day November 28 Day after Thanksgiving November 29 Christmas Eve (observed) December 24 Christmas Day (observed) December 25 New Year's Eve (observed) December 31 EMEA New Year’s Day (observed) January 1 Good Friday March 29 Easter Monday Bank Holiday April 1 May Bank Holiday May 6 Spring Bank Holiday May 27 Juneteenth (observed) June 19 Summer Bank Holiday August 26 Christmas Day (observed) December 25 Boxing Day December 26 APAC New Year's Day January 1 Uttarayana Punyakala / Makara Sankranti January 15 Republic Day January 26 Good Friday March 29 Ugadi April 9 Khutub E-Ramzan April 11 May Day May 1 Juneteenth (observed) June 19 Independence Day August 15 Gandhi Jayanti October 2 Deepavali (Observed) October 31 Kanataka Rajyotsava November 1 Christmas (observed) December 25 Take special note to the holidays based on your location, as they may differ from public holidays in your specific country. Example: If your organization falls within the EMEA region (including, but not limited to UK, France, Germany, Switzerland), all days listed under EMEA are holidays Khoros Support will be observing that year. Standard support coverage will resume on the next business day. Note: We're prepared to support anyseverity level 1 issue all year round, 24x7x365. Should the need for this arise, be sure to include the nature of the service outage or security risk, a link to the impacted environment, and your contact information. To receive severity 1 support at any time, email outage@khoros.com.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 outagesandinformation about our general status pageavailable 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 simplyaren't any issues! Reaching Out If you have a Technical Account Manager or CSM, please make sure that they and Support are aware of yourimpending 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 addProactive 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!Cases Activation and Deactivation
Question How can I activate/deactivate users to view and submit cases through the case portal? Answer To activate a case portal user, please create a case by emailing support@khoros.com and mention that you want to ACTIVATE this user: Full Name Title Email Address Phone Number Khoros Community Username (the user must be registered on this community first) Community and/or Account To deactivate a case portal user, please create a case by emailing support@khoros.com and mention that you want to DEACTIVATE this user: Full Name Email Address Khoros Community Username (link to profile is preferred) Community and/or AccountKhoros Support Contingency Plan
Khoros is committed to providing ongoing coverage regardless of natural disaster or crisis (regional or global). Our customers need to be able to work with our team regardless of the situation or region. Therefore, our support organization is prepared and built with redundancy to absorb any short term impact from unpredictable causes. In the event that any individual Khoros office is impacted by a threat that results in the actual or effective shutdown of said office--for example, from potential Coronavirus impacts--we have the following contingencies in place for all products and levels of support, including Technical Account Management, Severity 1 Outage, and standard support: Regional Coverage Support is located in a number of locations including Austin, Bangalore, London and Portland. Any location may be called up to work 24/7/365 to cover for an office that is impacted. Remote Staffing In addition to our office locations, we have remote staff members that can be deployed to work 24/7/365 to augment existing offices. Work From Home All locations are empowered to immediately enact a temporary work from home policy, allowing our entire support staff to continue to work with limited impact. We will continue to evaluate the need for any additional contingencies based on business or customer requirements.How often do we update our Severity 1 and 2 cases?
When you submit a case to Khoros, we do our utmost to ensure that your case is taken care of. As an organization that is focused on customer satisfaction and success, our normal case update cadence for highly impacted customer support tickets is as follows: Sev 1: Every 60 minutes or less, based on material updates Sev 2: Every 3 business days These times may vary by contract, support tier, or agreed upon communication timeframes and may be adjusted based on operational needs. If you experience wait times outside of these expectations, there are two options available to you: You may contact your designated CSM and they will work with support leadership to review cadence concerns. For cases that are Sev 2 or above, we would recommend escalating the Support ticket in question using these steps: https://community.khoros.com/t5/Support-Information/Escalating-Support-Cases/ta-p/411300General Outages & Notifications via status.khoros.com
We've updated the status page to provide more specific and targeted information regarding the topics that you care about.This allows us to also be more proactive in order to provide the necessary details to you, our customers, about what is occurring on our servers, APIs, or functionality within the product lines. It is our goal to continue to improve this communication and we are happy to continue to receive feedback. What's the URL? http://status.khoros.com/ What does this provide? You'll receive an email or SMS about new investigations, monitoring, or resolutions as they occur based on your preferences and selections. It is the best way to be proactively notified about any problems across the Khoros product lines. Who should sign up? Anyone that's interested in keeping up to date about our infrastructure should be signed up. This includes administrators, community moderators, Care supervisors, or even agents who are expected to respond to customers! It is always great to know what is going on with the tools being used and this is the place to get that information. Won't I get spammed? We update this page only for relevant information and you can select the subcategories to be notified about. By default, everything is checked but there may not be any need for you to be notified on Communities API if you're only using Care in your business (even if we think you should use both!).How do I close a support case that's been resolved?
When you have an open support case, you will be able to see a new button on the case details page with the option to Close case. Once you are happy that your support case has been resolved you can click on the button, which will trigger a popup box confirming that you would like to close out your case with the support team. Once you have closed your support case you will be able to find it in the Resolved tab in the Case Portal. Note: If you wish to let us know why you are closing your case, please feel free to leave a comment on the case before closing. You may also receive a survey after the case is closed.What information should I provide if I am having performance issues?
Question What information should I provide to Support if I am having performance issues? Answer When diagnosing performance issues, it is extremely helpful to have the following information: Product.Which product(s) are you having issues with? Define slow. What do you mean by 'slow'? e.g. How many seconds/minutes did it take to load a page? Narrow the scope. Is the slowness specific to any set of browsers/users? Is it everyone at a particular location? Everyone at the company? Specify details. What is loading slow? (header, footer, images, boards, messages, signatures, avatars, javascript, etc) Any particular URLs loading slow? What region do you live in?
