Technical Support Policy

• Mission
• Goals
• Services
• Supported Products and Releases
• Eligibility
• Contacting Support
• Customer Notification Goals
• Commitment to Quality

Mission

The technical support team is dedicated to providing responsive, effective support that helps our customers use Insightful products effectively.

The technical support team is committed to:

• Minimizing customer response time.
• Ensuring customer satisfaction by having pleasant, responsive, qualified people work on each customer communication.
• Delivering effective answers as quickly as possible.
• Providing customers with ongoing updates of unresolved problems.

The technical support team helps customers both through one-to-one communication and by maintaining a self-help website. The team provides:

• Direct, one-to-one assistance by telephone and e-mail.
• Extended support hours from 6:00am to 5:00pm Pacific Time (9:00am to 8:00pm Eastern Time) in the United States, Canada and South America, and from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm GMT in Europe.
• A comprehensive web site containing FAQs and examples.

The following services are examples of what is included in technical support for supported products:

• Installation assistance.
• License key generation.
• Assessment of scope and severity of possible defects in the product (but not in user-written code). Team members make commercially reasonable efforts to provide workarounds for defects. The technical support team will notify the product development team of defects.
• Diagnosis of abnormal termination of program.
• Standard examples grouped by both functionality (e.g., using the GUI, statistical techniques, VB/COM clients) and industry (e.g., finance, pharmaceutical).
• Advice on, but not implementation of, S-PLUS programming. This advice is limited to S-PLUS programming, and does not include other languages, such as Visual Basic, C++, or C.
• Explanation on using S-PLUS functions as described in the documentation. This excludes modifying an S-PLUS function in a complicated way, to perform analyses or other tasks that are beyond the intention of the documented function.
• Assistance in debugging customers' S-PLUS code. This assistance is limited to interpretations of error messages, and standard discussions on debugging practices and error isolation. Technical support team members do not provide direct debugging for more than 15 lines of code.

The following services are examples of what is not included in technical support:

• Coding custom examples or functions, or re-coding examples and functions so that they use a customer’s data set.
• Debugging more than 15 lines of user-written code. The team does not search for and isolate the cause of error messages in large user-written S-PLUS programs.
• Implementation of S-PLUS programming.
• Helping create custom applications or analyses using a third-party language, such as Visual Basic, C++ or C.
• Translating SAS or procedures from another software program into S-PLUS.
• Advising customers on modeling data, interpreting statistics or types of statistical analysis to use.
• Training a customer in basic statistical concepts, or providing a personal tutorial in the S-PLUS product.

Insightful may not be able to provide full support for problems that manifest themselves on auxiliary platforms that cannot be replicated on primary platforms.

Supported Platforms and Versions

Supported Platforms

Insightful provides technical support for supported products on all listed primary and auxiliary platforms.

PRIMARY PLATFORMS: Insightful has tested and verified that the application runs on all listed primary platforms, and these operating systems are currently installed and running in our technical support center.

AUXILIARY PLATFORMS: Insightful has verified that the application runs on all listed auxiliary platforms, but these operating systems are not currently installed and running in our technical support center.

Click here to view the current supported platforms:

• S-PLUS Supported Platforms
• S-PLUS Server Supported Platforms
• Insightful Miner Supported Platforms
• Insightful Clinical Graphics Supported Platforms

Supported Versions

Insightful provides technical support only for the current major release of a supported product and the version immediately preceding the current release. Bug fixes are provided on a when and if available basis for the latest release only, and workarounds are provided on a when and if available basis for the current release and immediately preceding release only. 

Customers must have a current maintenance contract to receive technical support services for a supported product. If you need to renew your maintenance contract, please contact your account representative (or, if you purchased your software from a party other than Insightful, please contact the distributor from whom you purchased the software). Even if you are not eligible to use technical support services, we would still appreciate any product enhancements/suggestions that you have, which can be posted using our Product Enhancements/Suggestions Form.

Contacting support

You must provide the following information when contacting technical support:

• Serial number of product
• Individual and company name
• Full and exact text of error message, if applicable
• Product version
• Operating system of machine

Distributor Network

• When returning voice mail or email requests for help, the technical support team will make at least 2 contact attempts, at least 3 business days apart. If the initial contact from the customer contains insufficient information to verify that the customer has an active maintenance contract for the supported product in question, then the technical support team will make only 1 contact attempt.  If the customer cannot be reached and does not return messages, then the support request is closed.
• The technical support team will respond as soon as practicable to voice mail or email requests for technical support. Even for difficult and/or time-consuming questions, the technical support team will attempt to respond within 3 business days to let the customer know that someone is actively working on the problem, even if no answer is available yet.
• Customers are updated on the status of unresolved problems approximately once a week.

Insightful is committed to providing high quality, responsive technical support for our customers. We hire highly skilled support engineers and we regularly assess customer satisfaction through individual feedback and from surveys. Please take a moment to help us serve you better by completing our customer satisfaction survey.

This policy was last updated December 10, 2007. Please check for periodic updates as this policy is subject to change.