Customer Support Program
Support Desk
Service Level Agreement
The summary below is provided for information purposes. Full details of Northern’s Support and Maintenance Service Level Agreement is available, here.
Standard Support and Maintenance
Opening a Ticket
Tickets should be submitted via this form. Tickets can be opened in the customer’s local language but the customer should expect detailed correspondance to be received in English.
In order to progress and resolve a support ticket it is clearly essential that Northern’s Technical Support Team are given reasonable access to information about the problem/question, the customer environment and other applications running in that environment.
All information supplied by the customer is treated as strictly confidential.
Response Times
Target communication intervals depend on the classification and severity of the ticket; progress updates are less frequent for an intermittent fault in a minor feature than for sustained failure of a major feature. Target initial response times and communication intervals are summarized in the table.
Response times and communication intervals are measured in local (for the customer) business hours (9AM-6PM), Monday through Friday. For example: a ticket properly submitted at 2PM EST that receives an initial response at 9AM EST on the following day will have an initial response time of 4 hours.
|
Severity Level
|
Target Initial Response-Time
|
Communication Interval
|
|---|---|---|
|
Severity 1 – Loss of service; users are unable to work
|
<8 Hours
|
<16 Hours
|
|
Severity 2 – Sustained failure of a major feature
|
<8 Hours
|
<16 Hours
|
|
Severity 3 – Intermittent failure of a major feature – Sustained failure of a minor feature
|
<12 Hours
|
<20 Hours
|
|
Severity 4– Intermittent failure of a minor feature
|
<16 Hours
|
<32 Hours
|
Augmented Support and Maintenance
Certain customers may be eligible for Northern’s Augmented Support and Maintenance SLA; providing increased accessibility to Northern’s expertise. This service level is available for purchase exclusively by larger organizations with complex needs or environments. Benefits of advancing to Northern’s Augmented Support and Maintenance service level are as follows:
- Priority queuing of support tickets
- Appointed Solution Manager
- Business Review meetings
- Automatic qualification for beta programs
- Software maintenance services
- Discounted Professional Services
If you believe that your organization would benefit from these additional services, and that your organization is eligible to enroll, please contact your account manager. You can find contact details for you regional sales office here.
