Support Policy

After Hours and Business Critical Support

After hours support is only available for emergency or business critical issues only. Business critical issues are those deemed to cause work stoppage for more than 50% of staff. Any issue deemed to be non business critical may result in hourly charges for those with support contracts, a 50% rate increate for hourly contracts or use of 1.5x hours for those with pre-paid hours.

Regular work may be scheduled for after business hours at any time and is not subject to these terms. Project work should not require after hours support unless specifically scheduled as part of the project. Our current support hours can be used to determine timing for after hours support. Consultants may also use best judgment to support unscheduled non business critical issues after hours at no additional cost.

Service Level Agreements

Team Tech Guru, Inc. offers Service Level Targets (SLT's) to all customers with fixed contracts only. Hourly contracts or those with pre-purchased hours will be serviced with best efforts.

During regular business hours, non-critical issues reported before 2 PM will receive a same day response with many responses in less than 30 minutes. Issues reported after 2 PM may still be addressed the same day, but may in some cases be addressed the next business day.

With respect to after hours support for Business Critical issues as described in "After Hours and Business Critical Support", our staff respond within 1 hour and be onsite within 4 hours or remotely login within 2 hours. The onsite SLT only applies to client offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although our actual response times are much faster than our published SLT's, this ensures that appropriate expectations are set. Contact must be made by phone to ensure SLT after hours.

It is important to keep in mind that an SLT does not imply the time to actually resolve an issue. In addition, long term tasks like projects will be handled in priority order and may require multiple members of our staff to work on them. Given that it is difficult to determine how long a project may take to complete, realistic expectations will be set on a case by case basis with any needs to adjust the schedule reported to the client. It is critical that clients understand that any project that is not considered critical may take a lower priority for critical issues reported by their own staff or our other clients. We are certain that any client would appreciate us responding to a critical issue with their mail system being down instead of working on a new color scheme for a desktop standards project, for example.

Infrastructure Recommendations

A key aspect of working with Team Tech Guru, Inc. is that we will always make best efforts to ensure clients have the best possible design and take a proactive approach to ensuring system performance, uptime, and security. As a result occasional recommendations will be made to improve the infrastructure or to prevent future issues. Those with fixed contracts or who are working with a project rate who decline critical recommendations will be charged hourly rates for any work resulting from failure to implement said recommendations. Of course, any recommendation is optional, but this ensures that the risk is put on the client who wishes to take this risk rather than Team Tech Guru, Inc. who while working under fixed contracts and projects has a fixed cost associated with the work. Recommendations that meet these criteria will be specifically called out as Business Critical Infrastructure Recommendations.

For example a client with a fixed contract may have a system with no RAID protection or a hard disk in a RAID configuration that has failed. In this case a Business Critical Infrastructure Recommendation would be made to ensure the system runs a fault tolerant disk subsystem. If the client chooses to ignore this recommendation the subsequent failure of the unprotected hard disk and the need to restore the entire server from backup would be charged at an hourly rate.

It is important to note that the intent of Infrastructure Recommendations is not to force a client to spend unnecessarily and only reasonable recommendations will be made. It is understandable that certain financial conditions may impact a particular choice and as a result, multiple options will be presented when possible. In general any recommendation that is less than $50/user or $500/server is considered reasonable. However, each recommendation will be handled on a "case by case" basis.

Regular Site Visits

Our fixed contract clients also enjoy regular site visits which may be multiple times per week to once every two weeks depending on needs. This allows for our clients to report many issues that would otherwise go unreported and ensures that all users are serviced regularly, even those that may hesitate to create formal requests. It is critical that clients with fixed contracts are aware that our team members that cover Field Operations do their best to be on time for and service each client they have scheduled. This means that unscheduled visits are discouraged unless for Business Critical issues as described in "After Hours and Business Critical Support". We request that all of our clients respect the schedules of their visits and try to avoid unscheduled visits for non-critical issues. Although additional visits can be arranged, the potential for an additional hourly charge will be assessed at the time of the request.

Schedule changes or temporary adjustments may be requested on rare occasions by both Team Tech Guru, Inc. staff as well as the client but should be avoided when possible.

Onsite visits are for no particular duration and are intended for work that could not otherwise be resolved remotely. In addition, onsite visits often help to identify issues that would not have otherwise been reported. The actual duration of an onsite visit may vary and can be as short as 1 hour or as long as a full day in rare occasions. The average onsite visit for most clients is between 2 and 3 hours since most issues are handled throughout the week prior to the arrival of a Field Engineer. It is important to remember that those with fixed contracts enjoy unlimited access to our remote support team on all days of the week, which means that issues can and should be handled immediately instead of saved for the onsite visit - where these requests will be handled less efficiently. In addition, by reporting issues immediately and getting immediate remote assistance, this ensures that issues do not later become more difficult to resolve and that productivity is not impacted for an extended period.

Vendor Support Contracts

Team Tech Guru, Inc. recommends that where possible support contracts be maintained with vendors of applications and hardware. While it is not always required that a support contract be in place for use of a product, doing so ensures that should there be any issues with it that the product can be serviced or replaced. Team Tech Guru, Inc. cannot attempt to hack vendor products in order to keep them working outside of established support contracts and will recommend a support contract be established should any issues arrive with a commercially supported product that cannot be solved by using best efforts. Team Tech Guru, Inc. reserves the right to determine the amount of time that is considered suitable to spend on efforts to support a 3rd party product.

3rd Party Software and "Home Grown" Applications

Team Tech Guru, Inc. supports many types of software from a variety of well known vendors as well as lesser known and home grown applications. However, support on any product is limited to best efforts at all times. Our partnerships published on our website indicate the partners with which we may be able to obtain additional resources at no additional cost to our clients, but for any vendor we either have no partnership with or where our partnership limits the amount of support we can obtain without cost may result in the need to obtain direct support from the vendor of the product at a cost to the client. Team Tech Guru, Inc. will inform clients immediately if it is believed that paid support services will be required and reserves the right to determine the amount of time considered suitable to spend on efforts to support these products.

"Home Grown" applications or applications developed "In House" are supported only for documented and established use and deployment. Should any issues arise with these applications all troubleshooting will be the responsibility of the developer. Limited assistance can be provided to the developer to describe the issue, but any sustained troubleshooting of these applications would require a contract or engagement specifically designed for that purpose.

Customer and Consultant Courtesy

Team Tech Guru, Inc. strives to treat each of its customers with the utmost respect and courtesy at all times. Our staff members work hard to keep people that may be frustrated calm and hopefully resolve their issues to make them happy. However, abuse of our staff in any way is considered unacceptable. Service may be denied to a particular staff member of a client who is abusive to Team Tech Guru, Inc. staff. Such abuse will first be reported to Management of the client and if corrective action is not taken, support will be denied to that individual. In turn, Team Tech Guru, Inc. staff who are believed to not act in a professional manner should immediately be reported to Management of the client, who can then communicate this directly to Team Tech Guru, Inc. Management.