Timeframe for priority support?

[ellentk]

I recommended fast mail to a number of people. One of them has not been getting all of his messages. He opened a support ticket yesterday and more than 24 hours later got a reply saying that the problem needed to be bumped up to level two support but there were people ahead of him so he needed to be patient.

He has an enhanced account which entitles him to what fastmail calls "priority" support.
What exactly is "priority" support in terms of turnaround time?

And is any priority given to the type of problem? For instance, not receiving some of your messages might be assigned a higher priority then problems creating a rule or using the search. Is that factored in by fastmail support?

My own experience with fastmail support has been great. So I'm quite surprised by the reaction my friend has gotten.

[robn]

"Priority" means that your ticket enters the queue ahead of tickets from accounts with "personal" support (Lite and Full). After that, there's no difference, and they're generally worked on on a first-come, first-serve basis.

(Which is what the word "priority" means. Many people I talk to seem to think it means "someone will deal with this immediately". It's not; it just helps determine where in the queue you get placed).

Escalation to level 2 means that level 1 was not able to deal with it and the ticket is now with more experienced support staff. They know the service very well, have more admin abilities and have a direct line to operations (often me) for the rare occasions they need it. Obviously, there's not as many of these people, and the tickets they deal with are the more difficult ones, which often take longer.

Escalation past that gets you into operations proper, and by then it's usually a very hard problem, and it's not uncommon for these kind of tickets to take half a day or more to work through. The prioritisation is different at this level too. If the problem reported clearly affects a large number of users it will get worked on immediately. Something affecting a single user, or something that isn't critical, may take longer (it also gets prioritised against the person's "normal" work). The latter is by far the more usual case - there's almost never a support ticket that tells us about a widespread problem that we weren't already aware of from some other channel (usually monitoring).

I don't know why your friends ticket took 24 hours to reach level 2. The usual reasons are a busy ticket load that day, the ticket coming in at a time not well-covered by level 1, and/or the problem being worked on by level 1 for a while before realising they couldn't fix it and escalating it. We've been working hard for a couple of years to improve the first-response time, and though it's vastly better than it was a couple of years ago we know there's still more work to do.

[ellentk]

Thanks so much for explaining. It's good to know how things work.

A level 2 rep did get through to my friend earlier today and was able to solve the problem.

Ellen

[17pm]

Originally Posted by robn

"Priority" means that your ticket enters the queue ahead of tickets from accounts with "personal" support (Lite and Full). After that, there's no difference, and they're generally worked on on a first-come, first-serve basis.

(Which is what the word "priority" means. Many people I talk to seem to think it means "someone will deal with this immediately". It's not; it just helps determine where in the queue you get placed).

Escalation to level 2 means that level 1 was not able to deal with it and the ticket is now with more experienced support staff. They know the service very well, have more admin abilities and have a direct line to operations (often me) for the rare occasions they need it. Obviously, there's not as many of these people, and the tickets they deal with are the more difficult ones, which often take longer.

Escalation past that gets you into operations proper, and by then it's usually a very hard problem, and it's not uncommon for these kind of tickets to take half a day or more to work through. The prioritisation is different at this level too. If the problem reported clearly affects a large number of users it will get worked on immediately. Something affecting a single user, or something that isn't critical, may take longer (it also gets prioritised against the person's "normal" work). The latter is by far the more usual case - there's almost never a support ticket that tells us about a widespread problem that we weren't already aware of from some other channel (usually monitoring).

I don't know why your friends ticket took 24 hours to reach level 2. The usual reasons are a busy ticket load that day, the ticket coming in at a time not well-covered by level 1, and/or the problem being worked on by level 1 for a while before realising they couldn't fix it and escalating it. We've been working hard for a couple of years to improve the first-response time, and though it's vastly better than it was a couple of years ago we know there's still more work to do.

Since you answered. Care to comment on this thread? http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=69553

Specifically this twitter post: https://twitter.com/fastmailfm/statu...94747227975680

It mentioned "few months". It has now been more than 1 year.

[neilj]

Originally Posted by 17pm

Since you answered. Care to comment on this thread? http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=69553

Specifically this twitter post: https://twitter.com/fastmailfm/statu...94747227975680

It's pretty much been done. We've taken on several new support staff, and the vast majority of tickets are dealt with promptly, including during US hours now. The ones you hear about on a forum like this are of course the few that take longer than they should! Almost always, the ones that take too long are the complicated ones that have to be escalated to engineers rather than support staff, and the engineers have various priorities they are juggling along with the support tickets. We have made progress here too, assigning one engineer a week to dealing with support, but there's still always going to be stuff they're not familiar with that has to be assigned on to someone with more experience in that particular area.