Effective: July 1, 2024

Support

Overview

As the De Facto Standard for Data Erasure and Mobile Diagnostics solutions, Blancco offers our customers and partners several tailored support options, providing timely resolution for technical issues and inquiries.

Our Customer Portal (http://support.blancco.com) contains our Knowledgebase Articles, Product Release Notes, User Manuals, FAQ’s, Best Practices, Support Videos and the ability to access our Support Ticketing System for the creation and management of product incidents. Customers and Partners are encouraged to use the Customer Portal for timely resolution, as we collect and organize key elements for quick problem identification and subsequent resolution. 

For any Sev-1 issues, it is recommended that Customers and Partners call our Support Team, numbers listed later on this document.  You can also find a possible resolution to your issue and create an incident by visiting our Portal at https://support.blancco.com/, or simply create a support incident by sending us an email at support@blancco.com, whereas a reply will be automatically generated with your ticket number in the subject line.  

Blancco may, at any time, modify the Support Policy and Procedures to reflect market conditions and to better serve our customers. 

Support Structure

Blancco provides support coverage worldwide, and in 10 different languages: English / German / Spanish / French / Finnish / Swedish / Japanese / Russian / Hindi / Korean.  We leverage a multi-tiered support organization to ensure adequate coverage of all reported incidents from our customers. 

All submitted support incidents, are tracked with a unique “incident number” and can be viewed after logging into to our Incident Management system on the Support Portal.  All incidents are logged within one of our three main regions (Americas / EMEA / APAC) during local business hours, in which the teams work together to ensure a quick reply and resolution.  Our long-tenured Support Team leverages their extensive product knowledge and customer service skills as a recognized HDI Certified Support Center, to ensure high customer satisfaction.

Blancco Support Plans

Blancco’s support operations are designed to meet the varying needs of our clients worldwide, across industries and time zones. Each support plan within our Blancco Corporate, ITAD, and SMB Bundles is designed to offer unique features and resources suited for different business requirements.

  • Enterprise Support Plan (SPE) 
    This is Blancco’s highest Support Plan offering, included in our Enterprise and Pro-Scale Bundles, delivering 24X7 year-round support and specializing in proactive support functions designed to ensure our partners and enterprise customers receive the “best-in-class” global support. This plan also includes an option to add an assigned *Technical Account Manager, who will offer personalized guidance, proactive issue prevention, and strategic advice to optimize your performance.
  • Premium Support Plan (SP1) 
    A comprehensive level of support, the Premium Support Plan is included in our Power and Pro Bundles. It is designed to provide our worldwide customers’ application infrastructures the highest level of availability. Blancco’s technical support teams work efficiently to resolve issues and requests and to help take preventive action to avoid future issues, at advanced initial response targets.
  • Advanced Support Plan (SP2)
    Designed for customers whose business requires the security of knowing that a Blancco Support Engineer is available to assist Monday through Friday during business hours, excluding holidays (business hours and holidays may vary by support center). This plan, included in our Essentials, Core, and Select Plus Bundles, includes access to phone/portal/email.


The Initial Human Response is computed based on the time when the incident is submitted to our ticketing system and a human response.
Note: Maintenance Only (MO) is an exclusive offering reserved for qualifying small businesses, providing access to product upgrades and Knowledge Base only. 

FeatureDescription
Product UpgradesAbility to upgrade to the latest product versions
Portal SupportAccess to our Support Portal
Email SupportAccess to receive technical support via email
Phone SupportAccess to receive support by calling one of our area offices
Remote Session SupportAccess to host screen share sessions with our support team
Max Customer ContactsThe number of contacts permitted to submit incidents to support
Annual Remote Health CheckUpon request, a yearly 1 hour virtual meeting to review product configuration, best practices and optimizations
Annual Onsite Health CheckUpon request, a yearly half-day onsite meeting to review product configuration, best practices and optimizations
Technical Account ManagerAn assigned senior member of the Technical Support team, to act as customer advocate and host regular meetings to ensure overall account health.
Severity 1-2-3-4Product severity of the incident, described further in the Handbook

Technical Account Management

A dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) is available for purchase with our Enterprise and Pro-Scale Bundles, and will be assigned from the Senior Technical Support team within the primary region of business. The role of the TAM is to provide proactive technical advice, best practices and guidance to help you identify and address any potential problems, before they occur.  The TAM has direct communication with key internal stakeholders from our Product Management and Development teams within Blancco, to serve as the voice of the customer/partner and assist with product improvements.  

Benefits of TAM: 

  • Gain a direct relationship with a senior technical resource who has an in-depth knowledge of your requirements and our solutions. 
  • Prevent issues before they arise with proactive planning and technical reviews. 
  • Gain visibility into current and future Blancco products to help plan and meet your long-term goals for development of service(s). 
  • Receive priority access to product feature requests and fixes. 
  • Build a relationship with an adviser and advocate through regularly scheduled reviews. 
  • Escalation point for support issues (not to serve as 1st point of contact for new issues). 

Knowledge Base

Full access available to all Knowledge Base items from the Blancco Customer Support Portal:

  • Complete suite of user manuals & video tutorials
  • Erasure / Diagnostic specific support topics
  • Product Release News
  • FAQ’s

Remote Access

In some cases, Blancco may request and provide the ability to establish a temporary remote connection in order to identify root cause and corrective action (RCCA) of an issue.

Scope of Support

This chapter defines the scope and limitations for the technical support Blancco provides.  

Supported products and versions are defined in accordance with the Blancco's Product Support Lifecycle Policy 

The following are outside of the scope of support (unless otherwise stated): 

  • Software deployment, installation and training 
  • Workflow design and process optimization 
  • Custom integrations against 3rd party solutions 
  • Handling or troubleshooting issues related to 3rd party software not provided by Blancco 

Note that some of these activities can be delivered as a Professional Services engagement. If you are looking for an assistance on product deployment, process optimization or training/certification you can find more details from Blancco’s Professional Services documentation. 

Contacting Technical Support

Overview

The following section describes important topics we encourage our customers to consider, in order to expedite the resolution of new Support issues. Support’s actions include environment discovery, problem description, issue investigation, reproduction attempts and resolution. Based on these investigations, Support may provide technical explanations, instructions for configuration changes, workarounds, and in some cases software updates and hot-fix releases.

Contacting Customer Support

It is recommended that customers submit a Blancco incident request, using the appropriate channels listed below, based on the Severity (product) and Priority (customer impact). An automated response with a unique incident request number will be immediately emailed to you for your reference.  

Product Severity Levels

When submitting a Support request, please refer to the severity classification table below. Blancco will work with you to make a reasonable and conclusive determination of the severity level of the issue, and respond in accordance. Contact request methods are recommended.

Issue Severity LevelSeverity Level Description

Severity 1 – CRITICAL

  • Request by phone

Production server or other mission critical system(s) are down and no workaround is immediately available. 

Severity 2 – HIGH

  • Request by phone/portal


Major functionality is severely impaired. Operations can continue in a restricted fashion, although long-term productivity might be adversely affected.

Severity 3 – MEDIUM

  • Request by portal/email

Partial, non-critical loss of functionality of the software. Impaired operations of some components, but allows the user to continue using the software. 

Severity 4 – LOW

  • Request by portal/email

General usage questions, cosmetic issues, and errors in the documentation.

Customer/Partner Priority Levels

When submitting a Support request, please refer to the priority classification table below. This field is maintained by the customer or partner and gauges the overall impact to the environment

Customer/Partner Priority LevelPriority Level Description

Priority 1 – CRITICAL

  • Request by phone

Issue has Critical business impact.

Priority 2 – HIGH

  • Request by phone/portal

Issue has Significant business impact. 

Priority 3 – MEDIUM

  • Request by portal/email

Issue has Limited business impact.

Priority 4 – LOW

  • Request by portal/email

Issue has Minimal to No business impact.


Required Information when Submitting an Incident

As part of the problem reporting process, and for expedient resolution, we request you to provide as much environmental, issue, and scenario detail as possible.

The following items are recommended:

  • Support Case ID number: If your issue is already an open Support request, the unique incident number should be included in the “subject field” of the email.
  • Contact name(s) and company name: Your name and the name of your company, as well as the names of alternative contact persons including phone numbers and Emails.
  • Product information: Product line and version of Software on which the problem is based.
  • Problem description: A detailed description of the problem. This must include the problem(s) you are experiencing, any changes made prior to this/these problem(s), how long you have been experiencing this/these problem(s), etc.
  • Class Severity: Your determination of product impact.
  • Class Priority: Your determination of business impact.
  • Configuration Information: Valid and current configurations on which the product was installed or having issues with.
  • Error Messages: Precise error messages, log files, description of product behavior and symptoms.
  • Steps to Reproduce: List of steps that produce the problem and relevant test cases.
  • Description of Recent Environment or System Changes: Descriptions of any recent product or system changes that occurred prior to noticing the problem.

Registering a User Account to Blancco Technical Support Portal

  1. Access the Blancco Customer Portal site at: http://support.blancco.com/. 
  2. Click “Report an Incident” button. 
  3. Click “Sign up for an account” to create your user account. 
  4. Fill in the relevant details and click “Sign up”. 

A confirmation email will be sent to the provided email address, and you can finish signing up the account following the link provided in the email. During this process you will be able to fill additional account details such as your full name and password for your account. 

In case you have forgot the password for your existing account or the original link to finish the signing up process is not valid anymore you can reset your account password here: Forgot your password? 

Creating a Technical Support Ticket

  1. If you have a specific issue in mind, try searching for a solution from the Blancco Knowledge Base by typing relevant keywords to the “What do you need help with?” field.
  2. If you are not able to find the answers you are looking for, then create a support incident. Click “Technical Support Request”.
  3. Fill in the fields as carefully as possible and click “Create”.
  4. Once completed, you will be provided with a summary of your support ticket, and an engineer will respond according to SLA’s outlined in the Support Plans section of our Support FAQ document.

The Technical Support Ticket and Communicating with the Technical Support

The best way to handle the ticket related communication, is to do it from “Requests” view which lists all the Technical Support tickets associated with your user account. All the ticket history, including the status changes, can be accessed by clicking the ticket’s “Reference” ID. 

The “Activity” section lists all the events and comments related to the ticket. To add comments to the ticket, click the “Comment on this request…” section, click the “Add” button and type in your comment and it will be visible for the Technical Support Team member handling the ticket. 

You do not completely have to rely on the Support Portal as your only communication channel, as you will also receive email notifications when some event occurs with your open tickets (comments from Support, status changes, etc.). You can also directly reply to the email notification, which will keep the ticket communication going. 

Additional Technical Support Ticket Related Features

The Support tickets that you have created can be shared with other people, for example from your organization, by clicking the “Share” icon and typing their email address to the field. It is recommended that you only invite users that have already registered at http://support.blancco.com/.

Contacting Global Support via Telephone (Recommended for Critical Severity/Priority Issues)

Technical Support Engineers are available to assist our customers during regular business hours 8am-5pm, as well as weekend hours for “Support Plan Enterprise” customers. Contact the regional support center as appropriate.

LocationPhone number
United States+1 833-374-0744
Canada

+1 437-703-0609 

United Kingdom+44 127-988-1543

France

+33 353-320-061
Central Europe / DACH+49 714-1503-9004

Finland

+358-942-704-945

India

+91 95 13166907

Japan

+81 50 5050 9161

Korea

+82 2 578 7491

Malaysia

+91 95 13166907

Australia / New Zealand+612 8317 1123
Weekend Support (Sev-1 with Support Plan Enterprise)

Only Paid SPE Customers 

Support Escalations

In order to best assist our customers in gaining further traction on documented support issues, outside of standard incident processing workflow, we have put together the following as a guide.

Note: For licensing issues, it is best to contact your account representative immediately.

Before Escalating...

To assist when escalating is appropriate, the following is a list of items to check before doing so:

  • Is the issue known to support; do you have an open incident number?
  • Have you provided Support all the necessary detail needed in order to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue (product/version/environment/logging/steps to reproduce/etc.)
  • Using the Support Response SLA’s table below, has the afforded amount of time elapsed relative to the impact and urgency being experienced?
  • If your contact with the assigned Support Analyst has not provided the expected progress, have you requested to speak with a Technical Lead or Manager?

Escalation Path

Resolution times vary based on the complexity of the incident and environment.  If your incident needs additional attention, you are encouraged to follow the escalation path below to ensure your incident is getting the appropriate focus and attention.

Technical Support Analyst -> Technical Support Engineer -> Sr. Technical Support Engineer -> Team Lead/Manager -> VP.

Global Support Escalation Contact List

Technical Support will use internal system workflow processes and alerting mechanisms to be sure all incidents are receiving the appropriate level of response.

RegionNameTitleEmail

APAC

Nandkumar Palkar

Director

nandkumar.palkar@blancco.com

JAPAN

Hiroshi Tsurumaki

Region Manager

hiroshi.tsurumaki@blancco.com

AMERAydin HamiRegion Manageraydin.hami@blancco.com
EMEANiko PuruskainenRegion Managerniko.puruskainen@blancco.com

Global

Jesse Kittleson

VP Global Support

jesse.kittleson@blancco.com