Top 3 Ways to be the Best Support Customer

At JumpMind we provide support services for a wide variety of customers across many industries. We enjoy working with our customers, learning about their synchronization scenarios, and answering any questions they may have. In all of our interactions, we’ve found that some customers have a real knack for making it easy to help them, while it’s not as intuitive to others. In that spirit, here’s JumpMind’s top 3 ways to help us help you.

1. Provide Context – With many of our customers, we’ve worked with them throughout their design process as part of a JumpStart consulting engagement, so we already have some general context about their synchronization scenario. With others, we don’t have that context, so jumping into a very specific technical problem can be tough. Providing some context to your data synchronization scenario as part of a support request goes a long way in helping us understand the broader context. A list of context facts can be found in our JumpMind SymmetricDS design document under the “Quick Facts” section, which is the same template we use when consulting to design a data synchronization scenario. In addition to context on your synchronization scenario, some context around the overall problem helps as well.
2. Attach a Snapshot – SymmetricDS Pro includes a built-in support feature that bundles up a set of information about the current synchronization scenario and state of SymmetricDS including configuration and run-time information. We call this a “Support Snapshot” and it is a great way for us to get some details about your configuration to help troubleshoot any questions you may have. The following links provide the steps to generate a support snapshot from either the SymmetricDS Pro web console or command line. See How to take a support snapshot from the web console and How to take a support snapshot from the command line.
   None of your specific application data will be sent as part of the snapshot, just SymmetricDS configuration and information. Including this as an attachment to your support ticket will save time and get things started out on the right foot.
3. Send to Support@JumpMind.com – Some customers get ahold of individual email addresses for one or more of our engineers and tend to send support questions directly to them versus the main support queue. As people who have used support services from other organizations, we totally get it. Once you get a hold of a good support engineer, you don’t want to let them go! The good news about JumpMind is ALL of our support engineers are excellent. They ALL work on the product itself and have intimate knowledge of the product. At JumpMind, you won’t get a “support” engineer, you really get a developer who just also happens to do support. Sending to Support@JumpMind.com ensures you don’t send something to an engineer who is on vacation, etc. Using this email also gets your ticket logged into our system and ensures it will be tracked and answered as quickly as possible.

We hope this helps, and please let us know your thoughts. We’re always interested in hearing from our customers.