2287393 - Support Processes and Incident Handling Guidelines - SuccessFactors Cloud

This Knowledge Based Article (KBA) provides more insight into support processes for SAP SuccessFactors support cases.

It covers the following topics:

• Business Impact:
• What is the business Impact?
• What information should we provide in the business impact statement?
• When is the business impact required?
• What is a good example of a business impact?
  
  
• Escalating cases vs. changing case priority:
• What is the best way to speed up or escalate an case?
• Can I/should I change the priority of an case?
  
  
• Support cases:
• Why am I being asked to open several additional cases for my issues? I just want all my issues to be resolved.
• What do I need to provide to create the perfect support case?

SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite

Business Impact

• What is the Business Impact?
  
  
• A Business Impact Statement is used as a tool to communicate the criticality of a customer’s case across all levels of the Support organisation including Engineering, Operations and Management.
• When the Engineering Team is prioritising tickets or the Mission Control Centre evaluating an escalation request, it is always the Business Impact Statement which is the focal point.
• Therefore, it is imperative that it contain all the relevant information that allows us to understand the criticality better.

• What information should we provide in the business impact statement?
  
  
• System Availability: Is your system unavailable? 
• Business Process: Does the issue affect a business process? 
• How is the issue affecting the process? If you have a financial impact, how is this quantified?
• Number of Key Staff Affected: Are there any key staff affected? How many? 
• Impending Deadline: If there is an impending Deadline, please provide the date and explain why/how this is affecting the deadline. 
• Security Issue: If you believe it is a Security issue, ensure you provide specific details about why and where the breach is.
• Workaround: If a workaround was provided but it is not suitable, please advise why this is the case.

Note: Every organization is different, with unique product configurations, and as such, the impact per issue will be greater or less depending on the key factors above. The more detail provided, the better our understanding and the greater chance attention the case will receive the proper attention.

• When is the business impact required?

• A business impact statement is required for each High and Very High case.
• This also applies to cases for which the priority was raised.

• What is a good example of a business impact?

“Our automated user import is not working. As a result, we cannot add the 500 new hires in our new location we added this week. This is delaying onboarding as all our training material is available via the application. We were advised to try running the import manually by downloading the file and importing it via admin tools, but we were not able to do this because the files are encrypted. Until this is resolved we are losing $$ per day each employee that cannot be trained.”

• A bad business impact for the same issue would be:

“Our automated import is not working since last week. Please fix it as soon as possible as it is urgent.”

• Additional info:
  
  
• KB article 2155240 provides central guidelines on how support cases will be prioritized.
• SAP Note 67739 - Priority of problem cases

Escalating cases vs. changing case priority:

• What is the best way to speed up or escalate an case?
  
  
• Typically, it is required to engage with our escalation teams to request the speed up of an case. This can be accomplished one of two ways:
  
  
• If a CSM has been assigned to your account (as per your support contract), then you can ask your CSM to initiate an escalation depending on your needs.
• If you do not have a CSM, you can call our hotline to request a speed-up or an escalation. You can find your country specific hotline number here: https://service.sap.com/call1sap

Note: To request an escalation or a speed up in the processing of a support case you will be asked by your CSM/support team to provide the Business Impact Statement, mentioned above.

• What about changing the priority of an case?
  
  
• You can change the priority of the case if you feel it doesn’t correctly reflect the actual impact on your processes.
• However, please keep in mind while changing case priority may be justified, it is mandatory to provide a business impact statement for each High and Very High case.
• When raising the priority for an case to High or Very High, you are required to provide a Business Impact statement.
• For speed up requests or to request an update to the case, please use the escalation/speed-up process defined above rather than raising the priority.
• If the case is on SAP's side when looking to raise the priority, please each out to the Customer Interaction Centre to make this change for you, on the hotline number advised above.
• If the case is on the customer's side (Customer Action or Solution Provided status) this change can be made by the customer by following the steps here: 1522544
• Additional information:

• SAP Note 1281633 - Speed Up Processing of a Customer case
• SAP Note 560499 - Customer Interaction Center: Hotline Numbers & E-mail Addresses
• SAP Note 90835 - SAP case Escalation Procedure

Support cases:

• Why am I being asked to open several additional cases for my issues? I just want all my issues to be resolved.
  
  
• Due to the number of modules and features available for customers to use, our support teams each have their own area of expertise.
• If one of our support Engineers is asking you to open another case, it is because they may have the expertise to work on one or more of the highlighted problems, but not all of them.
• By opening separate cases, you are helping us support you better by having several teams or Engineers work in parallel on the problem.
• Keeping only one case open will only delay investigations, as cases are only assigned to one resource at a time.
• Though it may seem like the same issue, some problems may require different solutions per issue. (Such as same error effecting two different environments, may require two different analysis) 

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