• Support Policies

Service Levels

Initial Response Time

Issues presented by phone or in person will be taken in the order presented, and should receive immediate Helpdesk assistance.  If all available Helpdesk personnel are busy and a call rolls over to voice mail, the message will be picked up and returned within 15 minutes.  Email and web submissions received by the Help Desk between 8:30 AM and 8:00 PM on each University business day will be acknowledged within 30 minutes of receipt. Requests received outside of those hours will be acknowledged on the next business day. 

Assignment

If an issue cannot be resolved upon first contact, it may be reassigned to a support specialist.  The owner will then contact the customer with updates per the guidelines below.

Priority

Priority levels are defined as follows:

 Priority   Definition
 Critical  Whole department or school affected, financial consequences or unrecoverable data loss imminent.
 High  Multiple users affected, necessary functionality impaired, unable to do work with immediate deadline threatened.
 Med-High  Necessary functionality impaired, time-critical work halted, deadline threatened.
 Medium  Necessary functionality impaired, but work can continue.
 Med-Low  No current functionality impaired, new functionality needed on a deadline.
 Low  No current functionality impaired, no time-critical functionality affected.

Update and Resolution Times

Our goal is to keep you informed of the status of your issue, and to do all that we can to meet our target resolution time.  Frequency of updates and target resolution times are defined per priority as follows, or as mutually agreed:

 Priority  Updates  Target Resolution
 Critical  30 Minutes  1 Hour
 High  2 Hours  4 Hours
 Med-High  4 Hours  8 Hours
 Medium  1 Day  1 Day
 Med-Low  Daily  2 Days
  Low  3 Days  5 Days

Please note that due to security restrictions, passwords can be reset by a limited number of personnel who are available between 8:30 AM and 8:00 PM during University business days.

Privacy/Security

You should be prepared to provide your Suffolk (student or employee) ID number whenever you contact the Help Desk for assistance.   The Suffolk ID number is on the ID card provided to each student and employee upon joining Suffolk University.

We cannot grant access to any account or reset a password without your Suffolk ID number.  For security, we may also request additional identifying information.  Account access and passwords can be provided to the University staff or student account owner only.

A University employee or student user’s personal information can not be given to any other party, not even a parent.  If such a request is made, Help Desk personnel will ask to speak directly with the user.