Overview

Skyetel takes support very seriously and we pride ourselves on our excellent reputation for our support times and responsiveness. In 2018, Skyetel's average response time to a non-urgent ticket submitted through our portal was 28 minutes with an average resolution of 1 hour and 2 minutes. For comparison, most Telecom companies first response is 48 hours with resolution being a week. 

However, we want to use this article as a way to set some expectations and offer insight into how our support department works - this will help you know why we are the way that we are 

Our Process

When a user submits a ticket, it is first reviewed by an Operations Administrator. It is this persons responsibility to review the ticket, identify that the request isn't fraudulent or spam, and then assign it to a Support Representative.  Once the ticket is assigned to a Support Representative, it is that agents responsibility to follow that ticket through to its completion. There are circumstances that will cause your ticket to be re-assigned (if a Support Person becomes ill for example), but that is not our goal. If Deon gets your ticket, he'll likely keep your ticket until your issue is resolved.

Our Support Department is encouraged to reach out to our customers by phone as often as is reasonable. We do this to make sure we fully understand what the issue is, and its scope of impact. It also is a culture decision we've made - we want to know our customers and we want them to know us. We find that building a relationship with our support department helps both us and our customers. 

Lastly - when a ticket is resolved, you will receive an automatic email from our support software (Zendesk) asking you how we did. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and is reviewed daily (literally daily) by Skyetel's Ownership.

Bugs

From time to time, we'll accidentally let a bug slip into our network. While uncommon, finding bugs is something that can happen. When you report an issue that is related to a bug, we'll send your request to our development department. Generally speaking, we squash bugs as soon as they are reported, but there are circumstances where a bug may persist for a few days while a fix is written. 

Getting Support

To get support, simply click on the "Get Support" menu item or the question mark on the top right corner of the screen:

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Once you click on either of those options, you will be given this screen:

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Each option is described in detail below

Create A Support Ticket 

When you click on this option, a dialogue box will appear letting you detail your request:

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From here - simply fill out the fields and click "Submit." We ask that you please be as detailed as possible in the Description field. If your issues are related to your phone numbers (unable to receive calls, odd call behavior, caller ID or spam errors, dropped calls, etc) please make sure you provide the Source and Destination Phone Number and the Time & Date. If that information is missing or incomplete, a support representative will ask for it when they reply. Unfortunately, our network gets many thousands of calls every minute, and its not possible for us to browse through our calls to look for odd behavior. 

We respond to tickets as fast as possible - usually within a few minutes. So expect to hear from us quickly after you put in a ticket. 

Request A Call

When you request a call from our Support Menu, you are automagically placed in a Call Queue just as if you called in. This will save you from having to call into our Support Department and wait on hold. Additionally, it allows our agents to review your request's notes and have up-to-date information available to them when you call in. 

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Please note - Requesting a Support Call does take a lower priority than submitting a ticket. If you need more immediate support, the fastest way to get help is to Create A Support Ticket

Start A Chat (Beta)

Our newest type of support, Chat-Based Support is still in Beta. We have not trained all of our team on this feature and you may experience longer than ideal wait times. This is ideal if you have a quick question or need some guidance on non-critical matters. It is our goal to roll out Chat-Based support globally (including to our Porting Department and Sales Department). 

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Calling Us Directly

When you first call into Skyetel's Support department, you will be required to enter your account number. You can find that information in the portal by clicking on your name in the top right corner:

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We require this information for two reasons:

1. Its required by law (seriously)
2. It helps us authenticate you 

We know that requiring your account number is very inconvenient, and we don't like doing it either. However, telecom fraud is a real thing and it does happen. While it is frustrating to need to put in your account number, it is much less frustrating than having all of your numbers deleted by a disgruntled employee. So please forgive us for this slightly draconian process - it really is for our customers benefit. 

Once you get through our British-voiced gatekeeper, your call will go into a support queue. We answer those calls as often as we can, but there are times when calls go to voicemail. This is a symptom of the fact that we are encouraging our support department to reach out by phone on submitted tickets (as we mentioned above). If your call is not answered, and you leave a voicemail, that voicemail will create a ticket. 

Voicemails

Please be aware that tickets that are created by Voicemail are usually given the lowest priority in our queue. This is for several reasons:

1. The voicemail transcription engine is not always 100% acurate
2. The support department may all be on the phone and unable to listen to your recording
3. Customers who are having call quality issues/no audio leave garbled/empty voicemails (so we can't understand what it is that is wrong)
4. Caller ID Information sent to us via the Voicemail System does not link the caller to their account - this requires an agent to look up the account prior to reclassifying the ticket

For those reasons, please make sure you put in a ticket via our portal prior to calling in and leaving a voicemail. 

Emergency Tickets

Emergency tickets are tickets that receive our immediate and after-hours attention. When you create an Emergency Ticket, our system will send an SMS to every member of our support team (and Skyetel's Ownership), a red alert message in our Slack, and flag the ticket with a different color inside of Zendesk. Almost everyone in the company becomes aware of the creation of one of these tickets and we take them very very seriously.

When to create an Emergency Ticket

Emergency Tickets should be created when you are having an issue that is impacting multiple Phone Numbers and/or Endpoints that you reasonably believe is caused by something wrong in our network. Issues related to only one phone number, or only one endpoint, often are not related to our network, and do not require our emergency attention. 

Emergency Ticket Descriptions

When you submit an Emergency Ticket, please put as much detail as possible in the description. Creating an Emergency Ticket with a brief/incomplete description will slow our resolution time and ultimately hurt you .

We want to know what is wrong as quickly as possible so we can try and resolve it as fast as possible. Additionally, because the description is viewed by everyone instantly in our Slack Channel and SMSs, you literally will have everyone in the company's eyes on your situation.

Misuse of Emergency Tickets

Emergency tickets are intended only for extreme critical emergencies where you have multiple endpoints or phone number failures. Please be advised that we may charge you an Emergency Ticket Misuse Fee of $250 if you do any of the following:

1. Create an Emergency ticket without details of what the issue is
2. Create an Emergency ticket without accurate details for us to reach you
3. Creating Emergency tickets repeatedly
4. Creating an Emergency Ticket when the issue is only impacting one phone number or one endpoint
5. Create an Emergency Ticket when the technical issues are caused by your own equipment

Please note that continued misuse of our Emergency Ticket feature may result in your account being suspended.  

API & Developer Support

The Skyetel API is intended for advanced administrators who either have development experience themselves, or have access to others who have their own development experience. Because of this, our support department is only able to provide very limited support with API and development questions. Our development team is not customer facing and is not able to provide any additional support beyond what limited support our regular support department can offer. 

Help Us Help You

The purpose for this article is to be as transparent as possible with our customers about the best ways to receive support. We love our customers, and we want to make sure your needs are met and that you have all of the resources you need from us to be successful. 

Bad Habits to Avoid

When requesting support, here are a few bad habits to avoid. These all result in your ticket being discarded or sent to the bottom of our queue:

1. Please do not directly e-mail support@skyetel.com or support@skyetel.zendesk.com. Emails sent to these addresses without a pre-existing open ticket usually are discarded. This is because we have no way of authenticating your support request, and fraudulent emails are too easy to create (and ZenDesk does not do a good job of helping us see that fraudulent emails are indeed fraudulent)
2. Please do not reply to Port In tickets with Technical questions/concerns. Our porting team cannot assign a ticket created in their department to the support department. Additionally, the porting department does not have the same internal response time obligations that our support department does.
3. Please do not email a support representative directly. For our customers security, support representatives are instructed to delete those tickets outright and not respond to them. 

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