Add-on Support
Last updated April 24, 2024
Table of Contents
Your add-on service is now either beta or GA and users are signing up. In the alpha phase, your focus was on integration and testing. Now that your add-on has launched, your focus should be shifting to the ongoing, day-to-day operation of your cloud service as well as assisting users who may experience problems with it. After all, your users are the sole reason you even have an add-on.
This article will give you an in-depth look at the support tools that Heroku provides to you, along with guidelines and expectations around supporting your users.
Support for alpha add-ons
Heroku does not provide customer support for alpha add-ons since the customer base for alpha add-ons is inherently a closed group with whom the partner should have already established an avenue of communication.
Support tools
Whether you have your own support system in place or not, we provide you with access to our support tool, which provides you a view of the tickets assigned to your add-on. This is where our support team will escalate customer support tickets that require your interaction.
You have two options for accessing and handling these tickets:
Using our support system is the preferred method of handling support tickets, as our user interface is designed to provide you with helpful information and features, specific to a Heroku user. If you already have a great workflow setup through your own Zendesk account, we are able to send these tickets to you there as well.
Maintaining Access
Whether you have your own support system (including Zendesk), you are still expected to maintain access to our support system. This is important in case there is a problem with Zendesk.
Heroku support system
Heroku maintains its own support system. Each add-on provider is given their own support view. This is where support tickets that are escalated to your support team will be.
When your add-on progresses to beta (and later to GA), confirm any and all individuals who need access to your support view are Company Users in the Partner Portal. This is what gives users access to the Heroku support system.
Upon receiving a support ticket, or a customer updating a support ticket that has already been escalated to you, all of your Company Users will receive an email about the change. Anyone wishing to discontinue these email notifications may do so by accessing the support system, clicking the name of your add-on in the top menu, clicking the With notifications button in the upper-right corner and selecting Without notifications.
All accounts associated with the add-on will receive an email notification when an open ticket has not received a response in 2 business days (also known as a “stale” ticket). These notifications cannot be disabled.
Once in our support system, upon viewing a support ticket, you will notice meta data about the ticket in the right gutter of the page. This will prove invaluable when helping the customer.
Lastly, please note that you are able to respond to a support ticket via email. We highly encourage you to only do this when it is extremely necessary as you do not have the context which our user interface provides.
Here are the steps that a ticket goes through, from start to finish:
- A user creates a new support ticket at help.heroku.com.
- Heroku’s Support team receives the ticket and determines that it is related to your add-on.
- The ticket is escalated to your support view, which sends an automated notification email to the members of your add-on.
- You write a reply to the ticket by logging in to the support portal. You also decide which state the ticket should be in:
Open: You need to add another response to the ticket before resolving the issue.With customer: You have replied and are now waiting for the customer to respond.Closed: The issue is resolved, and you do not expect the customer would offer any further response.
Closed or With customer
Never set a ticket to Closed simply because you have nothing more to say. While a customer can respond to the ticket still for a short period of time, doing this can be seen as inconsiderate or insensitive; giving the customer a bad impression of your company. Set the ticket to With customer which will gracefully close the ticket after a few days of no response.
Other features
Reassign to Heroku: Say this in a private comment and this will remove the ticket from your view and send it back to Heroku Support.Make comment visible to Internal staff and Add-on Providers only: Check this box to make a private note on the ticket, whether for Heroku Support staff or for your own purposes.
Zendesk
Heroku offers a Zendesk integration for companies that use Zendesk for support. Our system will sync tickets to your Zendesk, including the status, tags, and public and private comments. Tickets shared with your Zendesk are assigned to your team, and are your responsibility. If a ticket that is shared with you needs Heroku’s attention, please post “reassign to Heroku” in a private comment. This will alert our staff that action needs to be taken.
Since status is synced between the two systems, a ticket must remain “open” until the issue is resolved. Even if a ticket has been reassigned to Heroku, please do not put the ticket in a “Pending” or “Solved” state.
If you are using Zendesk and would like to begin using our Zendesk integration, please reach out to our ecosystem support team for assistance.
Support process and expectations
As an add-on partner, you are responsible for supporting your service and should be prepared to do so. Users will be asking questions and reporting problems. We expect that our add-on providers will respond to such inquiries in a timely and helpful manner, regardless of how they are submitted.
Heroku-submitted support requests
Initial support requests should be responded to within 1 business day. We also expect all tickets to receive an update at least once every 3 business days. As such, we strongly recommend against leaving a ticket open for a long period of time, e.g. until a bug is fixed. Instead, let the customer know the issue or feature request is being tracked, and, if possible, how they can follow along on progress (outside of the support system).
Direct support requests
Most add-on partners operate their own support ticket systems. At an absolute minimum, you need to provide a clearly advertised email address (such as support@yourcompany.com) through which Heroku users can contact you.
User Notifications
Occasionally, you will find it necessary to directly notify an add-on user. Under the terms of the Add-ons License Agreement, Heroku can provide you email addresses of your add-on users. You may use this information exclusively for issues related to the operation of your add-on.
Examples of acceptable notifications are:
- Scheduled maintenance notifications
- Information service interruptions and subsequent follow-ups on service status
- Plan overages
- Terms of Service (TOS) violations
- Product feature updates
- Product survey/feedback
All non-critical notifications must contain opt-out instructions or links.