ITRS - How can I get support from ITRS and what level of service can I expect

Can I get support on the ITRS Support desk, access to the Software Binaries and Documentation?

Our policy is that all employees within a client with an existing maintenance contract with ITRS can contact our global support teams to get support, get access to all documentation and download binaries.

Any client specific restrictions on downloads and deployment of configuration and software binaries must be enforced by the client themselves.

How I can I contact support?

Support works across many different channels. We can be contacted via our client portal support.itrsgroup.com, through our chat box on all ITRS Group websites for quick queries, emails to support@itrsgroup.com or via one of our telephone numbers. All these channels will raise a ticket in our global help desk system.

Replies to your tickets will come back via email and you can respond via the same medium. Alternatively, you can log-in to the support portal directly to see lists of your issues, update existing and raise new ones.

There is no need to create a log-in to be able to email our global support team as long as your email domain is registered as a client.  For example, if your email ends with @itrsgroup.com you will be able to submit requests, if your domain is not registered you will get a bounce warning when submitting queries via email.

We ask that any accounts you create and requests you submit must come from an email address that is associated with an individual in your organisation, due GDPR, team or functional email accounts are not allowed.

As an organisation with offices and staff around the world we have chosen English as our principle language for both internal and external communications. While we have numerous staff who are multilingual, we ask that all your interactions with Client Services are carried out in English so that we can offer you the widest coverage when you contact us.

If you required access to the portal to submit queries or have trouble logging a ticket do not hesitate to contact support@itrsgroup.com.

You can also phone support on the following numbers:

• United Kingdom - +44 1344 596268
• United States - +1 256 594 9505
• Sweden - +468 437 33 643
• Philippines - +632 8 299 3080
• Hong Kong - +852 3001 6621

How quickly can I expect an initial response?

We are committed to getting back to you on all queries within 2 working hours, but in practice we like to be more reactive than this (we have an average response time of 15 minutes). While our Help desk software has the ability to auto respond we elect not to turn this on, but instead get back personally.

On our chat and telephone channels we aim to be able to answer with 2 minutes.

When does the support desk operate?

ITRS provides a follow the sun support model throughout the working day Monday to Friday from our Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Malaga, Gothenburg, London, Tulsa and New York offices. In practical terms this means 24 hours a day for 5 days a week.  Services may not be available where there are regional holidays. In the case of more global holidays like Christmas day and Easter Monday this may effect many of our locations. Tickets and queries raised out of hours will be picked up as soon as one or more of our offices re-opens.

We operate as a global team, so any given query will be allocated to the best available resource in any region. This mean after a weekend most new tickets are handled via our APAC offices. 

What level of support can I expect and what do we cover?

We operate a strict 'Straight to second line' model where your query will be picked up by an experienced ITRS technical resource from the outset. Between us we have over 90 years of experience in our product lines and the associated technologies which they monitor. Tickets may move between techs as the investigation continues to ensure we are meeting your requirements with our best and most appropriate skill sets.

The support desk covers all queries relating to ITRS products and services, specifically:

• Installation
• Guidance with setting up new monitoring
• Advise in configuration or change to existing setups
• Best Practice in performance queries and tuning
• Enhancement requests
• Managing perceived defects
• Documentation links and ideas for improvements

Please note that ITRS support expect minimum levels of technical knowledge on the operating systems ITRS software is installed on and ITRS software itself.

What tends to fall outside the Support scope? - but we often try and help with best endeavours ...

• Help with Non-ITRS products (Operating Systems / Scripts / Third party software). Although our team contains experienced sys admins, DBA's,  market data specialists, dashboard gurus, etc, we are not always available to provide significant help to answer these questions.
• Hardware components of an installation (we will normally refer you to contact the manufacturers support services).
• Reconfiguration and green field work (we will normally refer you to our Professional Services team)
• Code and scripts written by you - the client, those written by third parties, or those deployed under the ITRS MIT license (https://resources.itrsgroup.com/useful-scripts).
• When you are knowingly using the product outside of documented standards.

What channels will we use to work with you?

• We understand that every client will have preferences for how you would like us to work with you, and we are committed to being as flexible as possible. As standard we are happy to:

  • Handle directly logged tickets in our support portal or received via email
  • Take your phone calls: Please note that it may not be possible to resolve the issue upon an initial phone conversation, we aim to provide you triage, guidance and quick help whenever possible, but there may be some investigation required.
  • Via Chat, we aim to provide you triage, guidance and quick help whenever possible, for the cases where further information and investigation is required, the chat will have automatically created a new ticket on your behalf, and we will continue towards resolution on the ticket. 
  • Visit you on site, note if you are outside one of our main geographies this may take a little longer to set up and schedule and may involve charges.
  • Perform a remote screen share, we can schedule the use Web-ex remote sessions, based on our agents availability, to provide assistance for complicated issues or situations we consider urgent enough to warrant a remote session..

  You should also have access to our on-line documentation and downloads

  • Software Downloads
  • Technical reference guides
  • FAQ Content
  • Release Notes
  • On-line (and free) training materials
  • Compatibility matrix

What is the work flow of a ticket?

The work flow by which a ticket is resolved is shown below.  The thicker grey lines represent the most common flow. In summary tickets can be raised via the web portal (https://support.itrsgroup.com), via Chat or via an email (as discussed above).

There will then be a discussion on a thread in the ticket. Respondents can update this via the web portal or by email.  At some point the ticket will be resolved, or become one or more change requests that will enter the ITRS development backlog. ITRS treat tickets in the change request state as still open.  The only condition under which a ticket will automatically close is if the client does not respond (having been asked for an update) within 1 month.  During this time, they will receive weekly reminders that we are awaiting a response. Under specific conditions tickets may be cancelled, generally when a duplicate has been opened.

How do we classify the impact of an open ticket?

Every ticket we receive is important to us, but we recognize that some need to be treated with greater than priority. We automatically rank tickets based on the business impact they are having while they remain open or on-going. Rather than have this as a typical (and slightly subjective) 1-4 scale we use the following survey to provide an objective score of the impact.  The results of this survey are available to clients as read only on all tickets, if there is any you do not agree with you can ask the analyst to update the fields, though please note we may ask for clarification of the revised answer to better understand the impact.

We use the values in the fields to generate an impact score to then order the tickets, from most to least important. The score of any given ticket is shown in the Impact field (an example is shown below).  Tickets are also ranked as Significant, Moderate and Minor.  We automatically generate a natural language description of the ticket for clarity, an example can be seen in the 'Description of impact' column below.  The ordered list of tickets can be seen in your client specific pages in ICE.

We use the values in the fields to generate an impact score to then order the tickets, from most to least important. The score of any given ticket is shown in the Impact field (an example is shown below).  Tickets are also ranked as Significant, Moderate and Minor.  We automatically generate a natural language description of the ticket for clarity, an example can be seen in the 'Description of impact' column below.  The ordered list of tickets can be seen in your client specific pages in ICE.

Geneos Site Visits

We are happy to come on site to try and resolve your queries.  In addition to that we offer proactive site visits at a frequency agreed between you and us, by way of example this may vary from bi-weekly to twice a year. There is no additional cost associated with this service its part of the standard maintenance package. On these visits we will typically cover any open and on-going tickets, any new queries you have, and discuss any projects where you think we might be able to add and contribute to. We assign one of our senior techs to each accounts, so the Analyst visiting you should remain consistent.

How do we on-board new clients?

We will need to register your E-mail domain on our Support desk and Knowledge base (for example @itrsgroup.com), ideally make contact with the main users of our products, and then arrange to meet you face to face to go over in as much detail as you need about the contents of this page and the other available resources. Generally, these meetings will be attended from our side by the ITRS sales account manager, and a senior resource from our Client Service team.  Based on your needs a Client Service Analyst will then be assigned to your account for the purpose of the pro-active site visits.

Requesting a Software Key

To get a new Software Licence Key contact the support desk via the channels listed above, we will be able to start the process to issue you with a new key.

Tracking change requests

If a ticket or query turns into one or more change requests for the software then the support desk ticket will remain open until such a time as the change request is complete.  Updates will occur directly on the support desk ticket when it goes into development in progress, and then complete.  The support desk ticket number is therefore your unique reference for the life time of the request.

We welcome and act on your feedback

At the end of every ticket we send you a conformation of the closure via E-mail. The E-mail contains an invitation to respond to a simple survey.  We take the survey responses very seriously, and are constantly making changes based on the feedback. Changes included:

• Building and updating the new FAQ site
• Modifying our support hours for higher demand from our Australian clients
• Adding the Gateway Diagnostics function to speed up issue detection in the gateway
• Adding new metric collection on user intent to identify hot spots where users regularly get stuck

We can only make effective changes in this way if we get sustained and reliable feedback,