SnapComms is committed to helping our clients achieve and maintain performance excellence. As part of that commitment, we aim to improve the SnapComms services by managing and resolving your technical inquiries or issues. This document outlines support options and processes to ensure clear service expectations and effective management.

The following technical support services are available to clients as part of the SnapComms solution 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year:

• The self-service Support Center
• Email support
• Phone support

NOTE: This services guide applies to SnapComms™ users. At this time, only English-language technical support is provided. 

SnapComms Technical Support Contact Information

Refer to the contact information below when contacting SnapComms Support. Crisis Commander clients can also contact support using the same information. 

SnapComms Support Center

The SnapComms Support Center offers everything you need to know about our products and services, system status, answers to frequently asked questions, contact information in case you need to submit a support ticket or contact us directly, and more. To access the Support Center from SnapComms, navigate to Resources > Customer Resources > Knowledge Base.

Support Case Management

Our team is available all day, every day, year-round, and aims to answer all support phone calls immediately and to triage support cases submitted via email or the Support Center within four hours.

When submitting a support case, you will receive an email notification when the case has been created. The notification will include the case number, the name of the Technical Support team member or tier assigned to the case, a summary of the inquiry, and the priority level that has been assigned.

*Cases must first be triaged to determine priority. If your case is urgent, please call Technical Support at one of the numbers listed above.

During the case triage process, the Technical Support team will work with you to gather as much troubleshooting information as possible, open and assign a priority level to your case, then proceed with additional troubleshooting activities as needed.

Security Considerations

• If troubleshooting activities require access to your data that is hosted on SnapComms systems, Support will request permission to view your data. Best practices are to provide this permission for each case, however, with written permission from Account Administrators, exceptions can be accommodated. Contact your Account Manager for details. 
• SnapComms Technical Support will assist users/contacts with system access requests by guiding them through using the "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links.
  • If the "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links fail to resolve the access request for the user/contact, they will be referred to Organization Administrators. 
  • SnapComms Technical Support will be available to assist Organization Administrators with access requests for their users/contacts that are not resolved with "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links.
  • NOTE: For most Everbridge products, you own the data that is stored within our system. SnapComms is bound by security rules for compliance certifications and is unable to access anyone's system without their express permission.  Reaching out to your Administrator is required in all cases where you are unable to reset the password yourself.
• SnapComms Technical Support will guide Account Administrators through creating user accounts but will not create accounts on their behalves. If there is no Account Administrator, Technical Support will work with you and your Account Manager (AM) to facilitate the creation of an Account Administrator.
• SnapComms Technical Support uses Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when accessing customer data. 

For complex inquiries, we may need to escalate your ticket to the next tier as defined below.

Support will set your expectations as to when you will receive the next update on your case. If an expected update time frame is not known, you will still receive regular updates on your case. You may also request that your case be escalated at any time, if (for example) you believe an unreasonable amount of time has passed since opening your case with no resolution. To escalate your case, simply call the Technical Support team and ask to speak with the Support Manager.

Service Advisories

SnapComms communicates maintenance activities, service degradation events, and system status alerts via service advisories posted on the SnapComms Support Center under Status. Service advisories are available for thirty days beyond the conclusion of the maintenance or event. If you would like to be notified of service advisories as they are posted, you can configure service advisory notifications by following the steps outlined in Support Center: How to Sign Up for or Unsubscribe From Service Advisories That Notify You of Updates, Changes And/or Issues Affecting Everbridge.

As of January 1st 2017, service advisory notifications for upcoming releases and other events will only be sent to users that have opted-in using the steps outlined at the link above.

Solution Maintenance

SnapComms is committed to maintaining the highest levels of performance and availability. There are occasions, however, when the service may be interrupted for planned or event‐driven maintenance. Defined below are the different categories of solution maintenance and the standard maintenance windows and advisory periods.

Planned Maintenance

Any maintenance activity with an anticipated impact on system performance, availability, or functionality is considered Major Maintenance. We provide a maintenance notification to our customers at least five business days prior to such maintenance as outlined in the Service Advisories section above. Our standard maintenance window for Major Maintenance is on Wednesdays between 6:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Maintenance with little to no anticipated risk of user impact is considered Minor Maintenance. Such maintenance may be conducted anytime Monday through Thursday. A maintenance notification will not be provided for Minor Maintenance.

Unplanned Maintenance

In order to prevent or mitigate potential service degradation, we may occasionally need to conduct maintenance without being able to provide an advance notification. Such maintenance is considered Unplanned Maintenance and we would provide a maintenance notification to our customers at least two business days prior to such maintenance as outlined in the Service Advisories section above. This maintenance will also be limited to our standard maintenance window on Wednesdays between 6:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Emergency Maintenance

If a service degradation does impact SnapComms, our first priority is to restore service and resume normal operation. Under such circumstances, we may need to perform restorative maintenance. Such maintenance is considered Emergency Maintenance and may only be conducted on an as-needed basis, with explicit Senior Operations Management approval. Due to the nature of such maintenance, it may be conducted without any prior notice and at any time of the day.

Incident Management & Root Cause Analysis

SnapComms understands that our customers rely upon our platform for critical communications, especially for health, safety, and critical business processes. We take incidents extremely seriously and work non-stop to resolve customer-impacting incidents. To provide a high level of service to our customers, SnapComms utilizes operational processes based upon the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, a de facto industry standard for IT service management. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a component of the ITIL problem management process.

As outlined above, our first priority with any service degradation is to restore service and resume normal operation. Once service is restored the focus changes to analysis, determining the root cause, and preventing recurrence. Prevention may contain actions to improve detection through monitoring, building additional or replacement infrastructure, or developing software enhancements. It may take several days of investigation and cross-team coordination to develop the appropriate course of action to best serve our customers. Engineering teams from many different disciplines become involved in resolving and reviewing incidents impacting the platform and our customers.

You may request a copy of the RCA document for any SnapComms service degradations where the root cause was determined to be within the SnapComms solution. The SnapComms goal is to be able to provide a documented RCA after the resolution of a critical event within five days of a request. This document will contain the following:

• Event start date
• Event end date
• Timeline of events
• Root cause of the event
• Corrective action(s) to restore service

An RCA is not provided if the root cause of the reported issue is determined to be outside of the SnapComms solution and therefore outside of SnapComms direct control. Examples of such issues would be regional telecom or Internet provider issues impacting the delivery of messages to recipients in a particular location or on a particular downstream telecom/wireless or Internet provider.