Service Level Agreement for Website Support
The following is a service level agreement for our website support services. This is only applicable for clients with an existing website support agreement in place and is not included in hosting-only agreements.
All clients who would like to use our support services on an adhoc basis may also submit a support ticket based on the understanding that the service is provided at £80 per hour, with a 1 hour minimum charge.
Support tickets can be raised by sending an email to [email protected] or by
creating a ticket at http://help.bingdigital.co.uk
Billing
Support is billed monthly at the start of each month along with your hosting, and must be paid in advance. Unless you’re using our ADHoc support service which will be billed with 30 day net terms. If you are a retainer client we require 30 days notice on your retainer.
Hours of support
We will apply our best endeavors to fixing problems as soon as they occur and several of our support staff are alerted via mobile devices in the case of incidents.
However, we can only agree contractually to respond to support requests during normal office hours of 09:00 to 17:00 local time, Monday to Friday excluding Bank holidays.
Support over Bank Holidays and out of office hours will be chargeable at double the agreed rate.
Why email and not phone is preferred for support?
Overall, we can provide a better service to you when we can see all the incoming support tickets from customers and can then assign these to the best person to complete the task for you.
If needed, we will call you back to discuss anything that requires further explanation.
Support tickets are also routed to our support staff in separate UK offices which avoids the need to try and call someone specific.
Of course, for priority one support – incidents which prevent customers being able to purchase from or use your website – , we understand itʼs really important so you need the flexibility to email or phone us, however progress on the ticket will be managed by our support desk tool.
Whatʼs included and what isnʼt included?
Generally speaking, a support incident is when something is wrong with your site. If a customer canʼt checkout, change their password, or a page doesnʼt work the way it is supposed to or is not rendered correctly in the supported browsers. These are the things we will investigate and fix as part of our support contracts.
We will provide support on the back-end operations of your site. If youʼre unsure of how to change a price or set up a discount code in your Emporium back-end, we can provide details of how to do this.
If you host your website with Bing Digital we also monitor and maintain servers working correctly 24/7/365. This will detect the majority of incidents and if necessary automatically restart services within seconds of a slow-down.
Priority 1 Incidents:
Priority 1 incidents are cases which prevent all customers being able to purchase from, or use your website. if we deem a problem to be priority 1 we will escalate it to the top of our work queue so that you receive immediate support.
What’s not included
We do not include general changes or enhancements to your site. If you want us to add a new feature or change something on your website this is classed as additional work and will be billed at your normal account rates.
We do not include completing multi-version software upgrades for new support contracts –
You need to be within one release of the latest version before you can enter into a support contract due to the time applying upgrades can take.
If you host your site with another company we cannot provide support for any aspects of hosting that affect your site operation. We will however, where possible, provide advise of what we think the problems may relate to where possible.
The support service cannot be used as an alternative to proper training, as such it is only available to trained users. Additional training can be booked in with your account manager.
We can help with specific issues, quick questions and problems, but we will not, for example, provide full telephone training on adding products to your website as part of your support contact.
If your pay for support in hourly blocks there is a minimum 10 minute support booking time for all tickets. Anything over will be logged accordingly and you will be given a break down of usage on a per monthly basis.
Please note. Support blocks must be paid in advance based on a monthly tariff. If support time is not used it will not roll over to the next month.
The support contract does not cover third party services. These are your own contracts and you should ensure that you have sufficient skills of your own or support agreements in place to cover them.
Examples of third party services include:
- Website analytics tools including Google Analytics
- Payment gateways such as Paypal or SagePay
- Fulfillment partners such as Royal Mail or CityLink
- 3rd Party hosting providers
In instances where Bing Digital are required to liaise with other suppliers in order to resolve problems which are the fault of that supplier, we may charge for that time at our normal professional services rates.
For further information please contact [email protected].uk
Escalation Process
The nature of problem solving is that we cannot estimate or guarantee how long a problem will take to fix, we can only promise to apply an increasing amount of resource and urgency to solving the problems.
The following is our escalation process:
Guidelines for an Escalation Issue
The support desk should be the first point of contact for all customer concerns and issues. They will review the scenario and will either provide information about the customers’ concern or transfer the problem to the correct internal department. If after contacting with the support desk about a problem or concern, a customer does not feel that they have been given the urgency or priority appropriate to the severity level , the escalation process goes into effect.
To formally escalate the problem, the customer should email the support desk and specify the message “Escalation”, the customer name and a contact number for your call to be returned.
Severity Definitions
Severity Level 1 – Critical Business Impact
The customer, has complete loss of service or resources for which no work around exists and customer’s work or business to trade online cannot reasonably continue. An example of a Severity 1 issue is the inability of more than one customer being unable resolve the the website to process orders.
Critical Alerts are charged at double time and alert all available support staff for urgent response. Please note this could wake out of hours staff. Use with care.
- 4 hours after initial call, escalated to Technical Director
- 24 hours after initial call, escalated to Managing Director
Severity Level 2 – Serious Business Impact
The customer, regardless of the environment or product usage, is experiencing significant or degraded loss of service from the application. An example of a Severity 2 issue would be a major website flaw with a work around.
- 24 hours after initial call, escalated to Technical Director
- 48 hours after initial call, escalated to Managing Director
Severity Level 3 – Minor Business Impact
The customer, regardless of the environment or product usage, has experienced a minor loss of service. A minor product flaw with a work around represents this type of issue. E.g. site has a problem which only exists in one browser version.
- 48 hours after initial call, escalated to Technical Director
- 72 hours after initial call, escalated to Managing Director
Severity Level 4 – No Business Impact
The customer’s website is in full working mode; customer’s work is not being impeded at this time. This can be represented as a minor irritant or frustration using specific features of the software or as a result of misunderstanding or inadequate training. The customer needs information regarding their account, usernames or passwords for FTP. These will be reverted to as quickly as possible and inline with the given time frame.
- 72 hours after initial call, escalated to Technical Director
- 96 hours after initial call, escalated to Managing Director
Severity Level 5- Enhancement Request
The customer is making enhancement requests/recommendations for consideration in future product releases.
- Reviewed and booked in accordingly – this is not covered under your SLA