About FirstHive Global Support Plan

Service Scope

The Global Technical Support department provides the following services:

Help Desk – User Query

Incident Management

Problem Management

Access Management

Change Management

 

Help Desk Facility

India active Hours

Support calls are routed through the Support Service Response Centre between 09:00 to 18:00 local time (IST) from Monday to Friday excluding India Public Holidays. However support issues can still be logged via FirstHive support tool during outside India active hours. The support team will only attend the issues during the next immediate business hours available. Active Hours is applicable for Standard plan only. However FirstHive provides 24*7 support to Gold, Platinum and Black plan customers. Other support communication channels will be active and functional as per Service Level Agreement mentioned below.

US active Hours

Support calls are routed through the Support Service Response Centre between 07:00 to 16:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST) from Monday to Friday excluding US Public Holidays. However support issues can still be logged via FirstHive support tool during outside US active hours. The support team will only attend to the issues during the next immediate business hours available. Active Hours is applicable for Standard plan only. However FirstHive provides 24*7 support to Gold, Platinum and Black plan customers. Other support communication channels will be active and functional as per Service Level Agreement mentioned below.

South-East Asia active Hours

Support calls are routed through the Support Service Response Centre between 08:00 to 17:00 Singapore Standard Time (SST) from Monday to Friday excluding Australia & Singapore Public Holidays. However support issues can still be logged via FirstHive support tool during outside South-East Asia active hours. The support team will only attend to the issues during the next immediate business hours available. Active Hours is applicable for Standard plan only. However FirstHive provides 24*7 support to Gold, Platinum and Black plan customers.Other support communication channels will be active and functional as per Service Level Agreement mentioned below.

Communication Channels

FirstHive Tech Support Tool

The response centre has a dedicated web page for logging the new issues. Support tool details will be shared with customers once they are onboarded. Reported issues will be acknowledged and resolved as per Service Level Agreement. For Standard users, SLA will be applicable during active business hours only. For Gold, Platinum and Black customers, issues can be raised anytime 24*7 and Support Executives will act on the tickets as per SLA.

Email

The response centre has a dedicated email [email protected] for logging new issues.

Support executive will respond to mail and create a ticket as per SLA (Standard plan – during active hours and Gold, Platinum and Black plan – 24*7). However Support executive will create a ticket in the next available active business hours if the email is sent outside regional active hours (For Standard plan customer)

Toll Free Number

24*7 phone support (Toll Free Number) is available for Gold, platinum and Black customers. Phone support is not available for the customers in Standard plan.

Dedicated Support Desk

Dedicated support numbers will be given as part of the support channels. Dedicated support team will be active and functional (24*7) for Platinum and Black plan customers.

Web-Chat

24*7 Web-chat support available for Platinum and Black customers.

 

Escalation Matrix

FirstHive shares Escalation Matrix to its customers for better customer satisfaction.If response time and resolution time is not met per agreed SLA, Automated mail will be triggered to the FirstHive Global Support Manager followed by Professional Service Head respectively as per FirstHive’s Escalation Matrix. All the stakeholders contact details will be shared with customers once new customers are onboarded.

Dedicated Named Support manager will be assigned to any account for Platinum and Black plan customers. There is no dedicated named support manager facility for Gold and Standard plan customers.

Tech Support Issue Qualification

Severity Classification

FirstHive Global Technical Support team shall use commercially reasonable efforts to respond to reported defects in the Licensed Products as quickly as possible.Severity of a ticket will be decided by the impact of the issue and it will be chosen by the Customer & overridden by the Tech Support team (if required) as mentioned below.

Severity 1 Defect:

The FirstHive platform is completely down or the majority of functionalities are inaccessible.

Severity 2 Defect:

One or more important functionalities for the account have become unusable; Flaws in Major business rules.

Severity 3 Defect:

Any other case where the platform is not functioning as expected; Any UI issues; Any performance concerns.

Severity 4 Defect: All enhancement requests and general questions.

 

Priority Classification 

In FirstHive, An Incident’s priority is usually determined by assessing its impact and urgency. Priority of a ticket will be decided by the Tech Support team based on Severity and urgency to fix the issue. There are below classifications of Priority of a ticket. Acknowledgement and Resolution time for below Priority tickets will be followed as per SLA.

Priority 1 (Critical):  Interruption making a critical functionality inaccessible or a complete network interruption causing a severe impact on services availability. There is no possible alternative.

Priority 2 (High): Major functions are not usable and interrupted. There is no possible alternative.

Priority 3 (Medium): Non-critical function or procedure, unusable but with no direct impact on services availability. A workaround is available.

Priority 4 (Low): Minor Non-critical functionalities not functioning. a workaround is available or a repair is possible

 

Support Process

FirstHive has an ITIL framework to deal with issues faced by its customers. Support department consists of various smaller teams based on expertise in different support areas like Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Access Management and Knowledge Management.

 

Incident Management:

 ITIL incident management is a reactive approach. Once any ticket is created, FirstHive Tech Support team starts working on the issue and resolves the ticket as per agreed SLA. Common ITIL incident management activities include:

  • Detecting and recording incident details
  • Matching incidents against known problems
  • Resolving incidents as quickly as possible
  • Prioritizing incidents in terms of impact and urgency
  • Escalating incidents to other teams to ensure timely resolution

Incident ticket status is given below. Creator of the issue will get notification in each stage of the incident.

  1. New
  2. Work In-Progress
  3. Waiting Info from customer
  4. Resolved
  5. Closed

 

Problem Management:

ITIL Problem Management is a proactive approach. The purpose of problem management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.

In FirstHive, Problem management involves three distinct phases:

  1. Identity the problem
  2. Analyze the problem
  3. Categorize and Prioritize
  4. Root cause analysis
  5. Identify the changes needed to resolve the problem
  6. Verify the problem
  7. Close the problem
  8. Monitoring

 

Change Management:

In FirstHive, any change must go through certain steps such as assessment, authorization, and Change Advisory Board (CAB) agreement before implementation

Benefits of IT Change Management in FirstHive,

  • Implement changes more quickly
  • Track the progress of changes to your IT infrastructure
  • Make your IT Change Management process more transparent, improving communication with stakeholders
  • Easily trace the roll-out of any changes if something goes wrong
  • Improve cost estimate for any proposed changes

There are five types of change management in FirstHive

  1. Standard changes
  2. Minor changes
  3. Normal changes
  4. Major changes
  5. Emergency changes

 

Access Management:

The main objective of ITIL access management is to safeguard the data from being accessed by unauthorized users. This is extremely vital for an organization as critical data falling into the wrong hands could cause irreversible damage to the company.

In FirstHive below steps are followed as part of Access Management,

  1. Requesting access
  2. Verification
  3. Providing rights
  4. Logging and Tracking access
  5. Removing or restricting access

 

Knowledge Management:

FirstHive provides Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) which stores a variety of attachment types such as text files and graphics files. The purpose of SKMS is to make sure that the right information at the right time is available for an organization’s requirement. Benefits of Knowledge Management include,

  • More efficient handling of knowledge
  • The reduced likelihood that multiple stakeholders will attempt to solve the same problem in isolation without first sharing knowledge
  • The ability to control the access of sensitive information to certain people

 

Tech Support Governance 

Reports:

FirstHive sends below support reports to Business to make sure everything is being functional as per SLA,

  1. Daily Health Check Report of the application (For Black plan customer)
  2. Weekly Status Report (Platinum and Black plan customer)
  3. Monthly Report (For Gold, Platinum and Black plan customers)
  4. Quarterly Report (For Standard, Gold, Platinum and Black plan customers)

 

Governance Meeting:

  1. Weekly Operations meeting via tele-conference (For Platinum and Black plan customer)
  2. To discuss critical Open and Resolved tickets
  3. To discuss Severity 1 & 2 tickets.
  4. To discuss RCA
  5. To discuss on Process improvement if needed
  6. To discuss on Patch updates
  7. Monthly Strategic meeting via tele-conference (For Gold, Platinum and Black plan customer)
  8. To discuss on SLA changes if any
  9. To discuss on Strategic Risks if any
  10. To discuss on Support upgradation plan if required