As the old saying goes, in this world nothing is certain, except that support tickets never stop arriving. If you are responsible for managing enterprise applications, you probably already know the frustration of long ticket closing cycles. For this short article, we talked to former and current OpenText Support staffers, and we are happy to share some tips on speeding up the process of resolving your next OpenText support ticket.
1. OpenText support channels
There are different ways an OpenText customer can submit a ticket: via the MySupport portal, phone, or email to support@opentext.com. The recommended and most efficient way is to submit a ticket via MySupport. However, if you don’t have access to the site, you will first have to register an account for your company before submitting your first support ticket.
2. Issue description in OpenText MySupport
You would be surprised how often customers submit support tickets with just a short message, like “We need support” or “We have an issue. Please help” and a screenshot of their log file. As you can imagine, this is not the best way of submitting a ticket, as this will not get a flying start at support! In order to speed things up from the beginning, make sure to provide a proper issue description. Try to capture all details in a structured manner. Describe in detail all steps that triggered your issue. Provide a date/time range for your issue.
3. Adding all resources to each OpenText support ticket
Generally, it’s better to attach too many resources to a support ticket as not enough of them. However, when adding additional resources, like screenshots and log files, add them as an attachment instead of adding them into the ticket body. When adding log files, make sure to add the whole log file whenever possible.
Usually, customers submit a lot of support tickets during new project implementation or product version upgrade. And a lot of times, customers don’t re-attach all issue-related project files as an attachment to each new ticket they submit, assuming that OpenText support managers can just take these resources from their old tickets.
We understand why they are doing so – because they don’t want to waste time on the ticket submitting, and want to speed up the process. After all, they pay for support, so OpenText should be able to pull their resources from other tickets. However, this behavior is just making it worse. Providing all this information from the very beginning eliminates the need for all the back and forth asking for more details.
OpenText support managers can’t just pull information from another ticket, because there might be a hotfix related to the other ticket applied already. Logs might not cover the needed time period. And, what is most important, before pulling information from any other open ticket, support managers will have to verify the information with the customer anyway. As you can see, not reattaching all needed files not only does not speed up the ticket resolution process, but can also significantly prolong it.
4. Full logs
As we already mentioned, customers should attach full log files whenever possible, and not just parts or screenshots of them. If the issue is reproducible, it’s recommended to have logs in debug verbose, when possible. Providing this information can often lead to a quicker ticket resolution. However, a lot of times customers are not willing to provide this type of information because the issues they have are in the PROD environment, and doing manipulations there, may affect performance. According to OpenText’s professional services team, this is true, it can have up to 10% effect on the system performance. At the same time, sometimes this is the only source that can provide a hint on the issue’s cause and root.
5. System details
From what we know, customers often forget to provide system details, which, just like all other pieces of information, are pretty critical for a timely ticket resolution. When submitting an OpenText support ticket, customers should always make sure to provide at least name, version and build details of the OpenText product they have issues with. In addition, make sure to provide details, such as type, version and build for OS and database as well.
6. Contact details
Provide a working phone number that you can be reached at. A lot of times, customers don’t provide enough information about the issue, or the provided description is unclear. In this case, having a working contact phone can extremely speed up the process. Unfortunately, customers often input a general office phone number, which is not really helpful. We understand that a lot of us are introverts, we don’t like getting calls from unknown numbers, and having to speak to people we don’t know, and that’s okay. But OpenText support managers won’t bite you. Actually, they also prefer to resolve support tickets on their own in a quiet and peaceful manner, and they most certainly will not call you if it’s not explicitly necessary. So, let the support team know that they can reach you via phone, if needed. After all, one short phone call can eliminate the need for a hundred emails.
Looking for OpenText Support?
Unfortunately, not all issues can be handled by OpenText support. Sometimes, even if you submitted a ticket and provided all the required information, OpenText refuses to handle a ticket because it’s out of the scope of the standard support. And sometimes, the submitted issue is related to a product bug, which will be fixed only in the next release. If that’s the case, feel free to schedule a free of charge advisory session with us. Headquartered in Boston Massachusetts, our team of developers and support engineers have been working with OpenText solutions and modules for many years. Having delivered 600+ projects, we worked out a secure and comprehensive way to help organizations implement and customize OpenText products. Also, check out our OpenText managed support page. We are looking forward to hearing from you.
