Contacting Support: How to contact and what we need to know

[vlad.lutschenkow]

The Iress support teams endeavour to respond to client requests quickly. We work through our queues in the following order:

• High severity issues 
• Urgent issues
• Issues impacting a small set of users such as errors on screen or in the data 
• Functional questions 

If you have a business critical issue or outage, or wish to escalate an existing ISD ticket we ask that you call the Service Desk in your region so we can make sure your issue is worked on immediately.

However, if your service is operational or your call is not urgent we can respond to your problem more efficiently if you create a ticket on the Iress Connect Portal via the following link: https://iress-connect.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals 

Then click on the “Service Desk - Issues” tile shown below:

Remember to add as much detail so that when we get back to you we are equipped with the right answer to provide you a speedy resolution.

For all support requests, regardless of the function, it really helps our team if you can define what you were trying to achieve or do when the issue occurred. If there is an issue that we need to get fixed, by understanding what you are trying to achieve, we may be able to come up with an alternative for you in the meantime to allow you to carry on with business as usual.

Our forms in Iress Connect for Xplan, datafeed and API issues will guide you through what is required. There is also the video here that will guide you through the process of raising a request https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=338wJegEgKI

Training requests can be directed to https://learningcentre.iress.com/login/start.php  The team do not support configuration and Xmerge requests and can be raised with your Relationship Manager

We have also provided some further guidance below if you are reporting specific issues in an Xplan function:

• Contacting Support
• Minimum Requirements - All support requests
• What to tell us - By software
• Client Portal
• CommPay
• Xplan
• Xplan Datafeeds
• Xplan - EDAI / API
• Xplan - Xmerge (Incl Word and Excel Documents)
• Xplan - Xtools / Prime
• Xplan Mortgage

Contacting Support

There are different ways you can ask for help, if we have been unable to answer your question in our Ask the Community forum:

1. Telephone 
2. Iress Connect 

If you phone and need assistance with an issue that is not an outage we will request you raise an ISD in the Iress Connect portal. We can help you raise the request. The ISD raised will be added to our queue and will be responded to as the next service desk agent is available. Iress connect will keep you updated as the status changes. 

The video here will show you how to track your requests and the status updates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvNx7CV-bQ 

You must first be registered to use Iress Connect. You can have one of your colleagues who have already registered do this for you. Please see the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6CnRah1Wsk 

In some cases, your employer may have its own internal support team prior to raising them with Iress. We recommend you check internally before raising above. 

How do I tell where my request is? ISD Statuses in Iress Connect

• New - the ticket has just been raised in the portal and the ticket is not actively being worked upon
• Not Ready for Work - during the triage process the Iress Support team identified some key information was missing.  We need an update from you in order to start the investigation
• Support Specialists - the initial person working on your ticket has needed to ask for assistance from another member of the Iress Support team when they have some capacity
• Technical investigation complete - our engineers have completed their investigation. The Iress Support team will update you on next steps
• Ask Customer Feedback - during the investigation we need more information or clarification from you
• Customer Responded - during the investigation, we requested more information, and we have received that.  The investigation can continue.

Using the Iress Knowledge Base 

Iress Connect also allows you to view articles that will assist you in answering a functional question or troubleshooting an issue. Please see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va66A_gZ1kA 

Minimum Requirements - All support requests

Minimum requirements when lodging a support ticket (ISD) via Iress Connect

ISD (Support tickets) lodged by clients in the portal

Summary: A clear summary enables the team to quickly scan items in queue Description: The steps that a service desk agent is permitted to follow using the provided iAssist token to replicate the issue in your environment Tell us where you have the issue: Help categorise the query and push to the right team to resolve your issue Instance Name: The instance name is applicable for solutions where we host your solution. Adding the URL of your Iress software will enable us to quickly bring up your site  Number of Users affected: Does the item impact a single user or all users ? Business Impact: Is it an error on screen or a functional question or is their an outage or degradation on performance of a key function or the whole system  These items will help determine the Severity of the issue. Of course if your Xplan site is down or performance has degraded please phone the Help Desk

Avoid reporting multiple issues as this can lead to: 

•  Incorrect diagnosis of the specific issue to resolve 
•  Complicating the resolution path to the incident 
• The incident can be updated with the resolution of one item but the supplementary issues remain unresolved

What to tell us - By function

Client Portal

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your Client Portal issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Client Portal site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) and/or client(s) who are experiencing the issue - Name and ID
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Within the steps, please include: The order in which you completed things The specific areas you navigated to (Names and URLs help with this)
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?

CommPay

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your CommPay issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your CommPay site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Within the steps, please include: The order in which you completed things The specific areas you navigated to (Names and URLs help with this) Any specific templates used Any specific search criteria used
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?

Xplan

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your Xplan issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Stack Trace Errors

Avoid sending a picture of the stacktrace error. Instead press the ‘Send Report’ button and reference the stack trace ticket number in the support ticket you raise as well as the information below.  

All support requests

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Xplan site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Within the steps, please include: The order in which you completed things The specific areas you navigated to (Names and URLs help with this) Any specific templates used Any specific search criteria used
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?

Xplan Datafeeds

Helping you with any issues you are experiencing with datafeeds requires us to understand many bits of information to be able to get to the solution. For datafeeds, this can be especially important as we are not the only party in play and often have to distinguish whether the issue is within your system, within our IressNet solution that processes the feeds or indeed on the vendor side.  

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your datafeeds issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Important: If multiple vendors/providers affected, please raise multiple tickets, one for each. 

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Xplan site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Vendor	With which vendor or provider's feed are you receiving an issue
Adviser Details	As datafeeds are linked to an adviser mapping, please also provide the following: Adviser ID Adviser Name
Client Information	Please provide details of the affected client/clients or if multiple clients affected, please provide a couple of sample names for us to try. Please also provide: Xplan Portfolio Account Number  Impacted Asset Codes / Policy Number
Vendor	Any portfolio / transaction report attachments
Key things for us to know	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	Are multiple accounts impacted? Are there any date locks? Have you performed a refresh?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Screenshots and/or videos are always helpful for us to see at a glance the issue you are receiving.

Xplan - EDAI / API

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Xplan site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Specific EDAI/API call that is being made  What time and data did you make the call that failed? What username are you using for these calls  What parameters are you sending? What is the error message coming back from Xplan
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?

Xplan - Xmerge (Incl Word and Excel Documents)

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Xplan site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Detailed steps to replicate the issue on your site including: The steps taken to run the template Settings in fields and report parameters  Location of the templates being used to run the reports Upload of the report output  The specific page on the output document where the issue occurs
Expected Outcome	Expected outcome versus observed outcome. What you believe the output should deliver in the report.
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour? Has this syntax been supported in a previous version
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?

Xplan - Xtools / Prime

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your Xplan - Xtools issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Xplan URL	The name / URL of your Xplan / Prime site.
Affected User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	Please provide a clear statement/understanding of the general problem or of what you are trying to model.  If you believe that the Xtools/Prime calculation or methodology is incorrect or you would like it to work differently, please state why you believe this to be the case and add your relevant legislative and/or product references.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Within the steps, please include the order in which you completed things Please also include: Client ID / Name Scenario ID / Name
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?

Xplan Mortgage

Please add the following information to assist us with the troubleshooting of your Xplan Mortgage issue when raising a support ticket with us:

Instance Name	The name / URL of your Xplan Mortgage site.
User ID	The user(s) who are experiencing the issue?
Scenario	What are you looking to achieve but cannot? This helps to understand what you were trying to do and provides context to the problem. It will also help our team provide any quick guidance on alternative methods to the same outcome allowing you to get back on with your day whilst we fix the issue.
Steps to replicate	Please provide detailed steps on how you found the issue to allow us to try and replicate it. By replicating an issue, we can see quickly how the issue occurs and it provides our developers key information to be able to fix it for you.  Within the steps, please include: The order in which you completed things The specific areas you navigated to (Names and URLs help with this) Any specific templates used Any specific search criteria used
Expected Outcome	What did you expect to see or do?
Observed Outcome	What could you see or do?
Past Activity	Did it work previously? If so, when did you last observe the correct behaviour?
Attachments	Any attachments that can help us step through the issue you are facing?