Have you ever asked a support question that you regretted a moment later? It happens to all of us, when complexity meets lack of time and a skipped lunch, we tend to ask some of the most obvious questions. Even more frustrating activity is trying to get basic answers that were probably covered somewhere in the wealth of documentation and knowledge base articles.

How about a frustrating system outage on your dedicated server that you needed addressed immediately but didn’t want to pay for escalated support? Even though we fulfill 99% of our support requests within the Urgent SLA window free of charge it still doesn’t seem friendly to get the nastygram about fees required for urgent support – especially when something out of your control is down.

Today, we fixed both of those problems with a small, even elegant, option that you may not even notice most of the time when opening a ticket. But trust me, you will like to know it’s there working for you. Take a look at the new “Service” dropdown option that is available when creating a new ticket:

This dropdown allows you to select the service that you are requesting support for. This helps us route the request to the most qualified individual on the support team that can address your request quickly.

Note that when you select an item you will be presented with a checkbox to tell us if this is a service outage. If the outage affects the entire organization, and you check this box, we will escalate the request for free and bump you to the front of the queue.

Please be mindful that we are monitoring for fraudulent use of this function. So in case your “system down” scenario consists of a single Exchange 2007 mailbox whose password expired, you might find this setting disappears if it is abused. Please be courteous to the other clients and use this feature when it’s absolutely needed, it’s here to save you money and I’m sure that in your time of need you wouldn’t want our support giving priority to something other than a true outage.

But wait, there’s more!

When you select the given category you will immediately be presented with the “Popular Answers” section right on the new support page. These articles are written by the staff that provides ongoing product support and contain a lot of information that you may want to look through and save time waiting for a response.

Hope you enjoy the ongoing improvements and keep on sending us your suggestions so we can serve you better.

This feature will be making an appearance in SM 3.0 for our MSP partners this May.