As I'm also in the process of refining our own support policies as one of us seems to have difficulty with understanding what is included with our service, what is not, and how not to give away the farm with every support call.

What I've been working on might be of use as part of the membership application-as well as to help ethical hosts determine the details of their support terms and communicate them to their clients, so I fleshed it out and tried to cover all the options.

Thoughts...comments...additions? How about ideas for more granularity on the definitions.

Support policy Template

Self-Service support:

___ Online Help files
___ OnlineTutorials
___ Printed Manual

Level 1 support: password resets, outage reporting, referrals to online help files or appropriate page in manual

Response time: Business Hours _______________ After Hours: _________________

Method of contact to request Level 1 support:

___ Toll free phone number ________________________
___ 900 phone number ________________________
___ Toll call ________________________
___ Email ___________@_____________
___ Online forum http://________________________
___ Pager: ________________________
___ Online live help: ________________________
___ Other: ________________________

Hours Available:

___ Toll free phone number 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ 900 phone number 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Toll call 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Email 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Online forum 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Pager: 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Online Live Help: 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Other ______________________ 24/7 Business Hours After Hours

Is a Supplemental Support contract required for After Hours Level 1 support? Y N

Please indicate pricing and terms of contract(s) _______________________

Level 2 support: Troubleshooting assistance, script debugging, third-party software/hardware support, development, user training

Response time: Business Hours _______________ After Hours: _________________

Is Level 2 support included free? Y N

Is a Supplemental Support contract required for Level 2 support? Y N

Please indicate pricing and terms of contract(s) ____________________

Method of contact to request Level 2 support:

___ Toll free phone number ________________________
___ 900 phone number ________________________
___ Toll call ________________________
___ Email ___________@_____________
___ Online forum http://________________________
___ Pager: ________________________
___ Online Live Help: ________________________
___ Other: ________________________

Hours Available:

___ Toll free phone number 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ 900 phone number 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Toll call 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Email 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Online forum 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Pager: 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Online Live Help: 24/7 Business Hours After Hours
___ Other:____________________________ 24/7 Business Hours After Hours

Level 3 support: Proactive server administration and management

Is a Supplemental Support contract required for Level 3 support? Y N

Please indicate pricing and terms of contract(s) _______________________

Hey, should online live help be considered 'other' or did I miss it. It's a pretty new thing for most people but a lot of companies are using it now (Human Click etc), as more than a sales toy. I know I do a lot of support through it these days.

Greg Moore

Online Live Help has been added to the template above.

Other suggestions, ideas???

thats a lot of help questions, does the online forum include like a kbase search for questions?

There are a lot of different ways of providing tech support.

I'm not sure what you mean by your question though. Are you asking if a keyword search is a requirement for an online forum? I'm not familiar with online support forums as we don't use them. Our support is the more traditional telephone and email.

Anyone who is using online forums as part of their support have any thoughts on this.

This template is not intended to be a standard for technical support, just to give member businesses a standard format for expressing what their policies are. I developed it for my own use as I'm in the process of rewriting our rather vague support policies.