Meridian strives to provide first-rate product support with the highest levels of customer satisfaction. This support policy details our product support, issue severity levels, support tiers, target response times, and best practices for an effective and productive support relationship.
Contacting Support
Designated customer administrators may contact our support team for help with functional or technical challenges between the hours of 8:00AM and 8:00PM EST, Monday - Friday. Meridian is closed on national holidays.
- Online: https://support.meridianks.com
- Phone: 866-485-6574
- Meridian Support: support@meridianksi.zendesk.com
All client requests are tracked in our online help center in the form of a ticket. Clients can submit a ticket online using the URL above, or a representative can submit a ticket on their behalf. After initial issue submission, Meridian may require additional information to help respond to the request.
Support Plans
To ensure that our customers achieve success with our software, product support is included with every maintenance contract or software subscription. Several support plans are available to ensure customers have access to the right level of support when they need it. Several factors can influence which support plan is right for you including your hosting option, code customizations, and API integrations.
Standard Support provides functional guidance and technical support for named administrators as it relates our standard base product capabilities. Our support, however, is designed to be a compliment to (not a substitute for) proper training. Effort exceeding standard support levels may be considered training and our team may recommend a more formal training option to better assist you.
Meridian provides Enhanced Support, as an add-on to Standard Support, for customer’s with special considerations including but not limited to code customizations or integrations using internal Meridian APIs. This enables ongoing support for these specific situations, which are not covered under standard support.
Please refer to your current support agreement for more specific details about what is included in your plan.
Support Tiers
Our support framework empowers your helpdesk and system administrators to handle the daily operations of the software, while providing a support avenue to keep your organization’s learning objectives on track. Customers are responsible for providing Tier 1 support for their end users, while Meridian is responsible for supporting our customers by providing Tier 2 and above.
|
Tier |
Support Provider |
Support Description |
|---|---|---|
|
Tier 1 |
Helpdesk or LMS Admin |
Addresses basic end-user issues and inquiries. Including general navigation, local set-up & network issues, and non-technical inquiries such as account creation, password resets, and granting permissions. Includes validating end-user issues prior to escalating to Tier 2. |
|
Tier 2 |
Admin Support |
Field questions and provide guidance to Tier 1 related to the use of software. Address basic application challenges/configurations/updates. Triage issues that prevent expected operation of the software. |
|
Tier 3 |
Advanced Support |
Addresses changes and incidents that prevent customers from using the software. Includes customer-specific configurations and customization, bug fixes and associated configuration.1 Includes investigation and triage of hosting, performance, and system jobs tasks and issues.2 |
|
Tier 4 |
Engineering |
Addresses major system changes and issues related to the software platform or external vendors which cannot be mitigated through Tier 3 support. |
1 Enhanced Support is required to ensure customizations and integrations are covered
2 Applies to Meridian-hosted software only. Additional support may be required for self-hosted clients
Issue Severity Levels
Our support team classifies the severity level of incoming customers issues. The description of each severity level and the target Tier 2 response times are detailed below. Response times may vary depending on an issue’s severity level.
NOTE: Issue severity levels were designed to support production environments. Support issues related to Staging, or other pre-production environments, will be responded to as soon as possible but will be classified at a Low severity level.
|
Severity |
Description |
Impact |
Initial Response Time |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Critical |
Production system outage. Complete or substantial loss of service on a production system preventing majority of user from accessing service. No workarounds available. |
All users |
2 Hours |
|
High |
Production system is working but may be considered severely limited. Important component or workflow is not functional. |
Majority of users |
1 Business Day |
|
Moderate |
Production system is working but a less-used component or workflow is not functional. Email related issues. |
Smaller groups or individual users |
2 Business Days |
|
Low |
Non-production system issues or production issues that have a low impact. Questions or guidance on product functions. |
Smaller groups or individual users |
3 Business Days |
Issue Escalation
If a customer feels as though an issue (submitted through our supported contact methods) is not receiving the proper attention or is receiving inadequate support, they can escalate their support request. In these cases, the following escalation hierarchy should be used. Escalations to a subsequent level should only be requested if the desired level of attention is not attained at the current escalation level.
- Your Customer Success Manager
- VP of Customer Solutions, support-escalation@meridianks.com
Software Updates
Most support agreements include access to new software updates. For cloud customers, Meridian will provide advanced communication of automatic software updates and all updates will be applied at Meridian’s discretion.
Private-cloud and self-hosted customers choose which updates are applied and when they are applied. Updates are typically planned based upon mutually agreed upon schedules and may require customer involvement for user acceptance testing (UAT). Meridian recommends that updates are scheduled at least once per year to ensure the highest levels of support. Professional Services may be required to perform these updates on the customer’s behalf.
On a periodic basis, Meridian may sunset support for legacy versions of the software in a manner that is consistent with reasonable standards in the software industry. Customers may still contact our support team for help if they are continuing to operate an unsupported version of the software as long as they have a current support agreement. In these cases, Meridian will make its best effort to provide ongoing support, however, our ability to answer questions or effectively troubleshoot may be limited. Customers operating on unsupported versions should work with their customer success manager to update to a more recent, supported version of the software.
Self-Hosted Customers
Customers who choose a self-hosted option must maintain an active support agreement to receive ongoing support for their installation.
Self-hosted customers are responsible for performing all system maintenance and update activities. Meridian will provide relevant update documentation to assist customers with software updates. Meridian strongly recommends that customers utilize Meridian’s Professional Services to assist in the installation of the software (or updates), if the customer does not have adequate technical staff or skills in place to support it.
Courseware Support
Meridian provides software support troubleshooting of third-party or customer-developed content, as it relates to successfully launching and tracking in the Meridian LMS.
Meridian’s responsibilities include: reviewing the course to determine what status/calls the course is passing to the LMS and ensuring that the LMS has properly taken action on those status/calls. For example: the course is responsible for passing a completion to the LMS after a user has successfully completed the course. Meridian will review the course to determine if the course did pass a completion status and also confirm if Meridian then appropriately marked the user as Complete.
Customer’s responsibility include: providing a user impacted by any reported courseware issue that Meridian can use to facilitate testing, providing any answer keys if the course/content contains a test/exam/etc., and providing the courseware files to facilitate Meridian troubleshooting as well as providing the name of the tool used to create the content if applicable. Meridian strongly recommends customers test content in the staging site prior to loading it in production to ensure the content plays as expected and records any relevant data. In the cases where customer cannot provide access to production or a full production database back for review, the customer will provide limited access to tables and/or row needed by the Meridian team to troubleshoot the issue.
Additional Services
Meridian’s experienced project and implementation teams are available to help customers with additional projects beyond the scope of normal support. Our teams can assemble quickly and are ready to support client projects of various size, scope, and complexity. Please contact your customer success manager if you’d be interested in defining a statement of work to engage further with a Meridian project team.
Typical Examples:
- Traditional LMS Administration Tasks
- Additional Data Migration (i.e.: Delta Migration Post Go-Live)
- Report Creation
- Ad Hoc Reports Consulting
- Project management oversight
- Functional/Technical Consulting (i.e.: API Integration Support)
- Instructor-Led Training or Educational Consulting
- Operating or maintaining a self-hosted software instance
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