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Thank you for purchasing support for your BMC Software solutions, and welcome to BMC
Software Customer Support! We strive to help you be successful with your BMC solutions
through commitments to both service excellence and continuous improvement.
This video will explain some concepts that guide the relationship between you and BMC
Support. Then it will show you the steps you need to take to get started as a new Support
customer, give you some tips that can improve your experience with Support, and explain
how an issue you file flows through our processes. First, the relationship.
Now that you are a BMC customer, you have access to BMC's Support Central portal which
includes 24 x 7 access to our knowledge base. If you can't find the solution
to your problem there, you can submit an issue with Support. BMC offers two levels of support.
If you purchased our BMC Continuous Support offering you get an initial response to Severity
1 issues within one clock hour and to Severity 2 issues within four business hours. We'll
work around the clock to resolve your Severity 1 issues 365 days
a year, and you can contact us at any time via several methods.
If you purchased BMC Premier Advanced Product Support you get even more aggressive service
targets, with an initial response goal of just one business hour to Severity 2, 3, and
4 issues. With this offering you get the features of BMC Continuous Support plus a focus on
your business and your environment. An assigned Customer Success Manager and a shared or full-time
Product Support Engineer understand your business goals and work proactively to help you reach
them. And we don't just have a record of what you've installed and how it's configured,
we maintain a copy of that environment so that we can test potential upgrades and other
changes before recommending them to you.
Each issue you file with BMC Support is assigned a severity level based on the impact to your
business. The lower the number, the quicker we respond and the more resources we devote
to the issue. An issue that critically affects a primary business service to the point of
losing data or crashing is considered Severity Level 1, or Sev1. An issue that seriously
affects a less-important service or system or stops an implementation is considered Sev2.
An issue that only moderately affects a still-functioning system and for which there is a workaround
is considered Sev3. Issues you submit by email default to this level. And a lesser issue
such as a question or documentation error is considered Sev4.
The Customer Support Care Sheet, also known as the Customer Welcome Guide, contains the
definitions of these severity levels and service targets for your reference, as well as complete
contact information for BMC Support and instructions for working with other Support resources.
If you don't already have a copy of this document, ask your BMC Account Representative
for it or download it from our website. It's available from the home page of BMC Support
Central.
Next you'll see how to get started with BMC Customer Support by registering a user
ID on Support Central and subscribing to Proactive Notification for your products.
But to do these things you need to know your company's Support Contract credentials,
an ID and Password. You can find these in the Order Detail document that we send via
email after your purchase is complete. If you haven't yet received the Order Detail
document, the Support Contract ID and a temporary password are sent earlier in the Order Confirmation
document. Both of these documents are emailed to the person listed as the "Ship To"
contact on the point of sale, usually someone in your Procurement or Contracts department.
If you don't know who that is for your company, you can find out your Support Contract credentials
from your Account Representative or by emailing customer_care@bmc.com from
your company email address and providing your full company name.
The first step in getting started is to register a user ID on our Support website. As many
people from your company as you like can each register their own user ID. This ID gives
you round-the-clock access to several services and resources, from managing your issues and
your maintenance contract to downloading products and viewing documentation.
To register, from Support Central click Register Now. Enter your Support Contract credentials,
then skip over the iLearn@bmc section, which is for BMC partners. The remaining fields
are required except for Salutation and Suffix. The password you choose must be at least seven
characters long. The next step in getting started is subscribing
to Proactive Notifications. These are emails from BMC to let you know about new information
that is available for one or more of your products. This new information might be a
Flash that alerts you to an urgent issue, a product change notification, online documentation,
or another type of information. For example, this one announces a new technical bulletin
for BMC Performance Assurance. You choose which products you want to receive notifications
about and the types of notifications you want for each.
You can subscribe to proactive notifications, also known as proactive alerts, from Support
Central. Click My Support Profile and then Create or Modify Customized Product and Subscription
Lists. Select the specific types of information that you want to be notified of, or select
All to be notified of all types. You can subscribe to notifications for any product, even those
you have not purchased. The last step is to check the version compatibility
of the BMC products you've purchased. The BMC Solution and Product Availability and
Compatibility Utility can tell you which versions of a third-party operating system, database
management system, or other application is compatible with a BMC product or component.
It also shows the compatibility of those BMC products and components with each other. Use
this utility to find out about potential compatibility problems before you install or upgrade your
BMC products.
To have the most successful experience with BMC Customer Support, follow these helpful
tips. Opening an issue with Support shouldn't
be your first resort. Instead, search BMC's Knowledge Base and Communities before opening
an issue. A search of the Knowledge Base can return workarounds, troubleshooting tips,
configuration information, and technical documentation. More than half of users who search here find
information that helps them, so using the Knowledge Base might be the fastest way to
resolve your problem. If your problem isn't critical, turn to BMC Communities next. The
forums here contain real-world answers from experts not only at BMC but also at partners
and fellow customers. If you are experiencing multiple problems,
don't open a single issue to report all of them. Instead, open one issue for each
problem. This allows us to more quickly assign the correct Technical Support Analyst to each.
It also means that these analysts can work on your issues at the same time instead of
one analyst finishing the first problem before starting work on the next one in the same
issue. Both of these things mean quicker resolutions for you.
If you are aware of a problem early in the day, don't wait until later in the day to
open an issue for it. Instead, open that issue early. This makes it more likely that Support
will be able to respond to you within the same day. Our standard business hours are
7am to 7pm local time Monday through Friday. So for example, if you open
a Severity 2 issue at 4pm we might not be able to respond to it until the following
morning. When you open an issue, don't provide only
the details of the symptoms you are experiencing. Instead, attach other supporting information
that will help us investigate the issue. Tell us about the troubleshooting you've already
performed, attach any log files relevant to the problem, and if you suspect a defect,
say so and explain the reasons. Providing this supporting information at the beginning
will reduce the number of times that we contact you to get it, helping us diagnose the cause
of your issue more quickly. The last tip is to not take physical delivery
of the software you buy from BMC. Instead, download it from our Electronic Product Download
website. Not only is this a faster way to get a product you've just purchased, the
EPD site also gives you direct access to the latest generally available service packs,
patches, and fixes in one place. We recommend that you keep up to date with the latest service
packs and patches for your product versions.
Now you'll learn how an issue flows through the Support process, including how escalations
work. When you call to report an issue, our Contact
Center opens that issue with the information you provide and assigns it a severity level
based on the impact to your business, as shown earlier in this video. The same is true when
you submit an issue via the web. Issues submitted via email default to Severity 3, so use the
web or the phone to submit issues with a high business impact.
Your issue is assigned to a Technical Support Analyst who owns it from this point forward,
and will be your single point of contact for the issue whether or not they are able to
resolve it on their own.
If the TSA cannot resolve the issue it is sent to a Subject Matter Expert. If they are
able to resolve it, the TSA notifies you. If not, the issue is escalated to R&D Engineering
and assigned to a Developer, who works with Support to provide a fix or workaround for
the issue. Again, the TSA owner notifies you of this fix or workaround.
If at any time you are dissatisfied with the service you are getting from BMC Customer
Support, you can escalate your issue to a Support Manager. For example, you might escalate
if the issue isn't responded to quickly enough for your business objectives, if resolution
doesn't seem to be progressing, or if BMC fails to meet its service commitments to you.
You can escalate an issue in several ways: by asking the Technical Support Analyst who
is currently working the issue; by contacting their manager, whose contact information is
found in any email message from the analyst; by calling your local Contact Center; or by
contacting your Account Representative. Regardless of the method you use, please include the
issue number and the reason you are escalating. When you escalate an issue, the Support manager
first conducts a situation appraisal to determine the cause for the concern that prompted you
to escalate. They then create a remediation plan and give you an expected timeline for
resolving the escalated issue. The manager maintains regular contact with you until the
issue is resolved to your satisfaction.
If an issue can't be adequately resolved through this standard escalation process,
the issue is assigned to a BMC Support executive, who has already received regular updates on
its progress. Throughout the escalation process, the Support manager and executive will engage
R&D Engineering and other BMC personnel as necessary to adequately resolve the issue.
We hope that from this video you've learned some basics about your Support relationship,
how to get started as a new Support customer, the things you can do to improve your experience
with us, and how an issue you file flows through standard and escalation processes.
Once again, welcome to BMC Customer Support! We look forward to helping you succeed.