Support Guidelines

The purpose of this guide is to provide clarity on support services provided by Brightbox and how customers can get the most out of these services.

We constantly monitor all aspects of our infrastructure and will add a report to our externally-hosted status site at http://status.brightbox.co.uk should we experience a problem with our systems. We also publish planned maintenance notifications to the status site.

Before contacting us with a problem, first ensure there are no current issues or planned maintenance. Time spent triaging and responding to new tickets by our technical staff is time better spent on fixing the underlying problem. We’ll usually provide status updates every few minutes, whether or not a solution has been found.

For convenience, we recommend subscribing to the RSS feed.

The Brightbox Helpdesk is located within the control panel at https://control.brightbox.co.uk

Generally the Helpdesk is for when you need us to do something on your behalf. Here are some tips for using our Helpdesk facility.

(see above)

If you have multiple, separate issues - it’s better to create separate tickets so that our support team can properly triage and prioritise issues and keep things as efficient as possible.

The more information you can provide on the problem you’re experiencing, the faster someone will be able to diagnose and fix it. It’s a good idea to use the following framework as a guide to make sure you provide enough information…

• What were you attempting to do
?
• What you expected to happen

• What actually happened

Use the information in Urgency definitions below to decide on the correct priority for your ticket. Unnecessarily increasing the priority of your ticket won’t get your ticket dealt with quicker and, in the cast of incorrectly reported “Emergencies”, may result in additional fees being added to your account.

If you find a solution to your problem, or find out more information which may be useful for our support staff - please update the ticket, this can save valuable time.

It can be stressful when something is broken or isn’t working how you expect, but staying calm will nearly always help get a quicker resolution.

When creating a Helpdesk ticket, it’s important to make sure that you select the correct priority (Low, Medium, High, Emergency) for your issue. The guide below should help you assess the correct priority for your issue - typical response times are shown in brackets.

• Billing issue
• Sales or General enquiry
• Feature request/suggestion

• You are experiencing problems with a Brightbox service

• Performance of a Brightbox service is degraded, but is available.

• An “Emergency” issue is defined as unavailability of your Brightbox service for reasons beyond your control (excluding planned maintenance). Creating a new “Emergency” ticket or calling the Emergency Support phone number (provided to Silver and Gold support plan customers) will put you in touch with an on-call engineer. Incorrect use of this service will result in a fee of £30 (normal hours) or £60 (out-of-hours) being made to your account.

Note: only Emergency issues are responded to outside normal business hours.

Our normal business hours are between 9am and 6pm (UK time) Monday to Friday, excluding UK public holidays (see table below).

Whilst you can create a ticket by sending an email to support@brightbox.co.uk we recommend using the Helpdesk form in your control panel, which is authenticated. For security reasons we cannot disclose any account specific details to support requests initiated via email.