About Your Request.

Choosing to work with us means you are committed to shared responsibility.  At TechBento we put senior system engineers is your first and only contact; to keep doing so we need your help.  Please understand your service level agreement, communicate clearly and effectively, and follow the process described here.

At TechBento, we consider all requests as part of our information security requirements as they contribute to confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data for our customers as well as our internal operations.

Your organization will comply with TechBento information security requirements, applicable laws, and mutually agreed on policies.

When we are dealing with you then our attention is entirely yours.  Mindfulness, empathy, and decisive actions are what keeps the ball moving on requests. Most importantly, sticking to the process and following procedures.  Here are some key bits of information that we expect from you:

• State the severity of the issue, with urgent requests affecting the entire business.   This is especially important after-hours as your firm will be billed fo on-call time.

• Limit scope to a single incident or task.

• If you are not the technical contact, be sure to copy them on the request.

• Use the subject field to outline the issue.  In the comments/notes you answer these key questions:

  • What were you doing or trying to accomplish? (include steps we may need to reproduce)

  • What did you expect to happen?  (the anticipated outcome)

  • What actually happened? (the actual event and any error messages or notices you received).

  • What did you do to try to solve it?

• For urgent but preventable problems, we expect a post-mortem where we collaboratively solve the root cause with the technical contact.

• Do not re-open issues unless it is relevant to the problem.  Even a simple thank-you can re-open a ticket, so please be mindful.

Here is a reminder about communication channels and how they are used:

• ZenDesk is the primary tool for incidents, problems, and tasks.  We guarantee attention on a request within established service level agreements and work to close each issue as quickly as possible.   When you open an issue, you are committing to responding promptly and working with us to close the request.

• Phone calls tend to be disruptive, so we ask you to save them for truly urgent matters that affect the firm, not a single user.  We only answer phones if we are available, and will not interrupt work on an existing request to pick up a call.

• TeamWork is the primary tool for communication, collaboration, and notes.  There is no time-component to this system and neither party is obligated to answer threads.  We each agree to stay on topic and use appropriate channels (Messages, Notebooks, Comments, etc) to logically organize and manage information.

• SMS/mobile/direct emails/others channels are unofficial channels and carry little weight in our day-to-day.

Please know that once your request is acknowledged by this message it is in queue to be solved as quickly as possible.  When providing follow-ups please do not start new messages, instead please reply to this thread.  Multiple reports of the same issue will be merged to the newest message and will delay your request.  In other words, always stay on the thread you care about and do not mix requests as it is guaranteed to delay (or annul) requests.

Requests in pending or on-hold status pause all SLAs and do not count towards our stats, but having open issues adds work-load to our teams. Out goal is to solve each issue.

For end-user level issues, during times of activity on your requests your systems may be accessed by our team.  Be sure to save work as we may disrupt the affected user in an effort to solve a problem or complete a request.  If you are working on confidential information, let us know and we’ll request access from you when necessary.

Thank you!

Shared Responsibility.

Shared support responsibility enables reduced downtime for employees and a lower total footprint for support costs and staff. While we provide infrastructure support services, you and your staff are responsible for the end-user devices and business applications. In areas of overlap, we work collaboratively.  

In the traditional PC environment employees commonly deferred to the IT help desk every time that they encountered an issue because they typically weren’t involved in picking out or setting up their device. Since hardware and software were not always reliable, organizations were more prone to issues and frequent downtime. In contrast, TechBento supports the use of best-in-class hardware and software also ensure that employees have less need to call IT for support, and when they do, a refocused help desk can encourage them to learn and grow on their own.

Leveraging documentation and meaningful support requests, TechBento promotes a user-centric support program. Most importantly, we encourage users to have a shared stake in the process and getting them to investigate issues themselves before they call for help. It also means rethinking how the help desk works. The goal of each support ticket should always be to help users solve their own problems.