Revised March 2021

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 (https://support.blancco.com), provides access to our Knowledge Base, Product Release News, Whitepapers, FAQ’s, Best Practices and the ability to access our Support Ticketing System for the creation and management of product issues. Customers and Partners are encouraged to use the Customer Portal for timely resolution.  For any Sev-1 issues, it is recommended that Customers and Partners call our Support Team, listed on page 9.  You can also 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 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, including 14 locations strategically distributed to provide support in 7 different languages: English / German / Spanish / French / Finnish / Japanese / Chinese. We leverage a multi-tiered support organization to ensure adequate coverage of all issues from customers/partners, including succession planning for each of our valued resources.

All support issues that are raised, are tracked with a unique “incident” number. All incidents are logged at one of our three main regions (Americas / EMEA / APAC), during local office hours. The assigned Support Analyst/Engineer is your point of contact until a resolution is found. Our Support Team leverages their extensive product knowledge and experience, as well as Blancco’s internal resource framework, to manage the incidents through to resolution in a timely manner.

Blancco Support Plans

Blancco support operations are designed to meet the varying needs of our clients worldwide, across industries and time zones. Each support plan offers unique features and resources tailored for your business requirements.

• Enterprise Support Plan (SPE)
  This is Blancco’s highest Support Plan offering, specializing in pro-active support functions designed to ensure our partners and enterprise customers receive the “best-in-class” global support. This plan includes 24X7 year-round support, as well as an assigned Technical Account Manager.
• Premium Support Plan (SP1)
  A comprehensive level of support, the Premium Support Plan 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 them Monday through Friday during business hours, excluding holidays (business hours and holidays may vary by support center). Advanced Support Plan includes access to phone/portal/email.
• Basic Support Plan (SP3)
  Provides you portal/email access to Blancco’s team of Support professionals for problem-solving assistance.

The Initial Human Response is computed based on the time when the incident is entered into our ticketing system and not when an email is sent to us.  All references relate to business hours.  The Initial Human Response is defined as any of the following:

• Providing a suggestion/solution to the Customer/Partner to assist in resolving the incident.
• Requesting additional information that is required before troubleshooting can commence.

Technical Account Management

The Enterprise Support Plan will include a nominated Technical Account Manager from the Support Team. The role of the TAM is to offer a designated senior Technical resource, providing proactive advice and guidance to help you identify and address any potential problems before they occur.  The TAM has direct communication with key internal departments within Blancco, to serve as the voice of the customer/partner. 

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 1^st 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.

Contacting Technical Support

Overview

The following section describes important topics we encourage our customers/partners 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/partners 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.

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.

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: https://support.blancco.com/
2. Click “Incident Management” button.
3. Click “Sign up for an account” to create your user account.
4. Fill in the relevant details and click “Sign up” to log in.

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.

In addition, you will also receive email notifications when an 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, 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 https://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.

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.