Sponge Client Support Terms

About this article

This article applies to customers with an active subscription on a Sponge hosted product. Sponge reserves the right at any time to modify this document, including new or additional terms or conditions on the use of its hosted products.

Sponge Support terms of use

Sponge Support covers the following hosted products and related web services, such as APIs, that support the service or software delivered to our customers.

• Spark Learning Management System (LMS).
• EnTraS Learning Management System (LMS).
• Ignite Content Authoring tool.
• Skill Pill Platform
• Bespoke Website/Application hosting.

Contacting Sponge Support.

All customers with a valid and active product subscription can contact Sponge Support to submit or update Support Tickets.

Types of Support Tickets.

Support tickets are classified into one of three types of ticket. Tasks, Incidents, and Questions:

• Task. Tasks may include change requests for customers using one or more Sponge products.
• Incident. Use an Incident ticket if a user is experiencing an issue with one of the Sponge products. Refer to Support Severity Levels & Response Times to understand how Sponge Support deals with Incident tickets.
• Question. Use a Question ticket if you have questions on the expected behaviour of a Sponge product or service.

Channels for contacting support.

Client support contacts can get in touch with Sponge for product support using the channels listed below.

* UK Business Hours are Mon-Fri, 9:00-17:30 (GMT)
** German Business Hours are Mon-Fri, 9:00-17:30 (CET)

Specified Support Contacts.

Sponge support provides a B2B service, meaning that only specified support contacts in your company may submit requests and engage with Sponge Support. There is no fixed limit to the number of named contacts which can be added. Sponge will agree the most appropriate support contacts prior to the commencement of any product subscription.

Languages.

Sponge support is provided in English within the UK and in German within the DACH region. Responses to support requests in any other languages will be handled on a best-efforts basis. The Sponge help centre uses in-product technology to provide translated interfaces for users. Knowledge base articles for products are available in English and may be translated into German.

Service Availability

Sponge ensures uptime for all provided platforms for at least 99% of business hours, measured over each calendar month. Our business hours are from 09:00 to 17:30 (GMT and equivalent CET) Monday to Friday inclusive, excluding any UK, Berlin, and German public holidays.

The status of Sponge products may be viewed at https://status.spongelearning.com/ 

Service Uptime Exclusions.

Scheduled maintenance, and any unforeseeable circumstances which limit or prevent Sponge service uptime, e.g., Force Majeure, are excluded from service uptime measurement. In the case of events outside of Sponge control, reasonable efforts will be made to bring all products and services back online.

Scheduled maintenance.

Sponge will perform maintenance on products and systems on a regular basis. These maintenance tasks update the capabilities of our products and adding value. This product maintenance is normally non-disruptive. Where maintenance takes place that requires the system to be offline, e.g., database changes, we will use reasonable efforts to notify clients in advance, and display the status on the following information page https://status.spongelearning.com/.

Disaster Recovery

The recovery point objective (RPO) is the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the duration of time within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity. Possible scenarios include:

• Data Corruption Scenarios
• Prolonged Interruption of Database Provider Scenarios
• Prolonged Interruption of Cloud Services (Azure Web)
• Denial of Service Attack on Web Services or related services

¹The EnTraS LMS platform hosting has hardware dependencies. In the event of a hardware failure, the above 72-hour RTO is possible for procurement and configuration of replacement hardware. Every effort will be made to align EnTraS RPO and RTO to match other Sponge hosted products.

Priority Levels of support tickets.

The table below describes how we classify ticket priorities within support. The support team may reclassify the priority level of a ticket at any time if it is reasonable to believe that the original classification is incorrect.

Reclassification is most likely where tickets are submitted as 'Urgent', but the situation contradicts that. Support may also increase the ticket priority if the situation is deemed to be more urgent than originally reported by a customer.

Service Levels & Response Times

The support team will triage any tickets created and respond appropriately; the team may also increase or decrease the priority of a ticket, based on initial investigations.

Sponge will use all reasonable efforts to respond and resolve within the timescales above. Our business hours are from 09:00 to 17:30 (GMT and equivalent CET) Monday to Friday inclusive, excluding any UK, Berlin, and German public holidays.

*Please note that any tickets, especially any change requests, which need input from the Sponge Software Development team, will result in longer turnaround times due to development & release cycles. Where this is the case, the support team will inform you of expected turnaround dates on the ticket, based on the development schedules.

Solving Support Tickets

Sponge employs an ITIL-like approach to solving support requests, focused on customer value first. This means that we will focus on restoring service/value to the business, whilst contributing to the continuous improvement of the service we deliver to customers.

When a support ticket is created, one of the support team will work with you to resolve your request. This resolution will include one or more of the following outcomes.

• After you open a Support Ticket, a member of the support team will work with you to identify and resolve your issue. The resolution provided by Sponge may include one or more of the following:
  
  
  • Advice on usage of the Sponge product to resolve any issues or requests.
  • A software fix being applied to the Sponge product.
  • A mutually agreed workaround that mitigates the situation, even if further investigation is needed to remedy the root cause.
  • Another solution, such as a reconfiguration of the Software i.e., a change made to the Sponge product to introduce functionality that mitigates the issue.
    
    
• Sponge considers Support Tickets resolved if any of the following occurs:
  
  
  • The support team has provided the steps to resolve an issue or has performed these steps for you.
  • Your issue is fixed, or an agreed workaround identified and applied.
  • The source of the issue lies with third-party software or hardware components. In this case, Sponge will continue to help as appropriate.
  • Pending tickets with a solution are not responded to within 3 business days.
  • It is not possible to obtain the information needed for troubleshooting using reasonable effort.
  • For issues that reoccur you may open a new follow-up Support Ticket that refers to the previous ticket.

Improving your support experience

To help with the troubleshooting of your incidents, please always include the following information in your tickets:

• Your name and company name and contact details.
• Specific details of the incident you are experiencing, and any steps required to reproduce it.
• Any error messages, times, dates, and screenshots; these are always helpful when describing incidents.
• Your opinion on the severity of the incident you are experiencing.

Using the Sponge support centre to submit your ticket via the form will help capture information accurately.

Support will also request feedback on completed tickets to assess satisfaction and also periodically request feedback on Sponge’s overall service provision.

Escalating Support Tickets

You can escalate a ticket to your account manager if you feel that:

• Your ticket has become more severe or should have a higher severity level; or
• Sponge is not resolving your support case appropriately; or
• Response Times are not being adhered to First Response and Subsequent Responses.

Before you escalate, please make sure that you have opened a Support Ticket to refer to. The information on the ticket must allow us to understand:

• The severity of the issue for your business.
• Why Sponge needs to apply a greater priority.

When you escalate a ticket, the support team will initiate an internal escalation to Support management.

Scope of Sponge Support

Sponge Support aids with issues on production environments, such as:

• Helping you understand best practice for product use and maximising value.
• Troubleshooting errors or unexpected behaviour with features.
• Troubleshooting API issues.
• Incidents detected by Sponge support staff.
• Incidents identified by Sponge monitoring systems.

Sponge shall have no obligation to support:

• The end-users of clients; support is a B2B service.
• Usage of Sponge hosted products on devices, platforms or browsers identified as not meeting the minimum system requirements.
• Incidents caused by client neglect, abuse, or mistakes during use of Sponge products.