About support case management

You can address incidents to Equativ’s technical support team at any time using the Client portal. The incident will be stored as a support case with a case number used to reference the case.

Support scope

Some types of requests are out of the technical support team's scope and should be addressed to your local service team instead. Such types of requests include the following:

• any solution that is not provided by Equativ
• any of Equativ's solutions that is not used per the product documentation
• any modifications to Equativ's solutions
• any code that is not part of Equativ's solutions, including custom code provided by Equativ's service teams, you or any third party
• problems associated with products running on any unsupported environment
• consulting services

Case language

As a general rule, you can submit your case in your local language. However, submitting the case in English can speed up the resolution time because the case can be handled by other, international support specialists as well.

Creating a case

Before you create a case, do the following:

• search in the documentation to see if it can help resolving your issue
• check if the technical support team is the right team to send our request to (see article Technical requests to service teams)
• check if your problem is already known and therefore listed in the Known Error page; this page contains articles about ongoing issues that Equativ has confirmed as such and is planning to fix soon; if applicable, workarounds are provided as well.

To create a case, proceed as follows:

1. Sign in on the login page.
2. If you are new to the portal, click on Register to obtain an ID and a password.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Contact Support” button.
4. Fill out the fields as explained in the table below.

5. Click Next to add collaborators to your case. In the Add Collaborators table, select the contacts you want to keep informed about the case’s progress. You can add only contacts who already have access to the portal.
6. Click Next to submit your case. On the confirmation page, note the case number; you must include this number in all communications with Equativ's technical support team. 
7. Click Finish.

Case processing

Managing the case priority

The priority assigned to a case reflects its impact on your business revenue. Once a case is saved, its priority cannot be changed. However, you can reopen the case and add a message requesting a priority change, along with a justification.

Equativ's technical support team prioritizes cases based on the selected priority and based on the service level of the individual customer. To learn more about the actual targets for the first response time (for new cases) and the overall case resolution time, please refer to your contractual Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Equativ.

* Specifics about blocker cases: The Blocker priority is reserved for severe incidents seriously impacting the levels of quality and service for multiple or all of Equativ's customers; typically, the root cause is a major outage in Equativ's IT infrastructure.

To keep an incident in Blocker status, Equativ may require that you make a technical contact continuously available to Equativ to cooperate efficiently — exchange expert knowledge, perform resolution testing, direct communication to experts on both sides etc. If you are unable to provide such a resource, Equativ may reduce the priority of the incident. Likewise, Equativ may increase a case’s priority to Blocker if the investigation suggests it is justified.

Analyzing the case

Equativ's technical support team applies a set of established processes and tools to analyze your case. Your technical support specialist will work with you to determine the nature of your case, reproduce the problem if required, answer specific questions, provide a temporary solution or workaround etc. Collecting diagnostic information may involve several iterations to isolate the problem and identify the cause. Therefore you may be asked multiple times to provide additional material.

Providing additional material

Your technical support specialist may ask you to provide additional material such as reports, logs, dumps generated with diagnostic tools and utilities. Your continued assistance with the diagnosis helps to further identify, verify and progress your case toward resolution.

To send a file to the technical support team, edit your case and click the Manage File Attachments button. With this method, the file transfer is secure (using SSL/https) and has no file size limitations other than browser limitations.

Requesting elevated attention

If you have concerns regarding a support case, you can notify the case owner's manager to resolve the issue and improve service quality.

1. Open the case you want to edit.
2. Click Raise a Case Concern on the right.
3. Enter your phone number.
4. Select a concern category:
   • No solution provided: The technical support team hasn't replied to the case.
   • Other: Any other reasons for the concern.
   • Repetitive tasks: The case requires too many tasks or actions to implement.
   • Unsatisfied solution provided: The solution provided is unclear, incorrect, or unacceptable.
5. Enter a description of your concern.
6. Click Submit.

The case owner’s manager will be notified and will contact you to mitigate the concern.

Reopening cases

You can reopen a case if you need further assistance with a resolved issue. To reopen a case: 

1. Open the case you want to edit. 
2. Click Reopen case on the right. 
3. In the Your message field, enter your message. 
4. Click Confirm.

Browsing cases

Click on My cases to display a list of your cases with their details: status, history and progress, attachments, priority, contact data etc. 

Closing cases

Typically, a case is closed when you and the technical support specialist agree that a resolution has been reached or when:

• the case conclusion is that the issue is not caused by a solution provided by Equativ
• the case is out of Equativ's support scope, e. g. consulting services; such requests should be addressed to the local service team instead 
• you indicate that the case is no longer an issue
• the case is identified as working as designed
• you become unavailable to actively work on the case; Equativ will make an attempt after a few days to contact you; if no response is received, the case will be closed

Answering the customer satisfaction survey

To help the technical support team continue to improve the services, a survey is sent periodically — please consider responding to the survey request. Your time and consideration are greatly appreciated.