Everbridge is committed to helping our clients achieve and maintain performance excellence. As part of our commitment, it is our goal to improve the Everbridge services by managing and resolving your technical inquiries. The purpose of this document is to communicate the support options and processes, and to effectively manage service expectations.

The following technical support services are available to clients as part of the Everbridge solution:

• The self-service Support Center, email support, and phone support are available 24x7x365.
• A top-priority phone queue to the Emergency Live Operator service is provided to help you send emergency notifications if you cannot access the Everbridge interface directly, and five emergency live operator messages are available per year without any additional cost. The Emergency Live Operator service is available 24x7x365.

NOTE: this services guide applies to users of the Everbridge Suite™ solutions. Only English language technical support is provided at this time. The Emergency Live Operator service is unavailable for Crisis Commander clients who do not have access to the Everbridge Suite solution.

Everbridge Technical Support Contact Information

From within the Everbridge Suite solution, choose Help & Support, then Everbridge Support Center to access the Support Center, where you can access personalized contact information, real-time system status, support cases, and more. Crisis Commander clients can contact support using the information below. See also knowledge base article EBS: Contact Us. 

Support Center

The Everbridge Support Center contains everything you need to know about our products and services, system status, answers to your questions, and contact information in case you need to submit a support ticket or contact us directly. To access the Support Center from the Everbridge Suite, choose Help & Support, then Everbridge Support Center.

Support Case Management

Our team is available 24x7x365 and aims to answer all support phone calls immediately, and to triage support cases submitted via email or the Support Center within four hours.

When submitting a support case, you will receive an email notification when the case has been created. The notification will include the case number, the name of the Technical Support team member or tier assigned to the case, a summary of the inquiry, and the priority level that has been assigned.

*Cases must be triaged in order to determine priority. If your case is urgent, call Technical Support at a number listed above.

During the case triage process, the Technical Support team will work with you to obtain as much troubleshooting information as possible, open and assign a priority level to your case, then proceed with additional troubleshooting activities as necessary.
 

Security Considerations:

• If troubleshooting activities require access to your data that is hosted on Everbridge systems, Everbridge will request permission to view your data. Best practices are to provide this permission for each case, however, with written permission from Account Administrators, exceptions can be accommodated. Contact your Account Manager for details. 
• Everbridge Technical Support will assist users/contacts with system access requests by guiding them through the use of "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links.
  • If the "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links fail to resolve the access request for the user/contact, they will be referred to Organization Administrators. 
  • Everbridge Technical Support will be available to assist Organization Administrators with access requests for their users/contacts that are not resolved with "Forgot Username"/"Forgot Password" links.
  • NOTE: For most Everbridge products, you own the data that is stored within our system. Everbridge is bound by security rules for compliance certifications and is unable to access anyone's system without their express permission.  Reaching out to your Administrator is required in all cases where you are unable to reset the password yourself.
• Everbridge Technical Support will guide Everbridge Account Administrators through the process of creating user accounts but will not create the accounts for them. In the event there is no Everbridge Account Administrator, Technical Support will work with you and your Everbridge Account Manager (AM) to facilitate the creation of an Everbridge Account Administrator.
• Everbridge Technical Support uses Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when accessing customer data. 

For complex inquiries, we may need to escalate your ticket to the next tier as defined below.

Support will set your expectations as to when you will receive the next update on your case. If an expected update time frame is not known, you will still receive updates on your case on a regular basis. You may also request that your case be escalated at any time, if (for example) you believe an unreasonable amount of time has passed since opening your case with no resolution. To escalate your case, simply call the Technical Support team and ask to speak with the Support Manager.

Service Advisories

Everbridge communicates maintenance activities, service degradation events, and system status alerts via service advisories posted on the Everbridge Support Center. Service advisories are available for thirty days beyond the conclusion of the maintenance or event. If you would like to be notified of service advisories as they are posted, you can configure service advisory notifications by following the steps outlined in the following knowledge base article Support Center: How to Sign Up for or Unsubscribe From Service Advisories That Notify You of Updates, Changes And/or Issues Affecting Everbridge.

As of January 1st 2017, service advisory notifications for upcoming releases and other events will only be sent to users that have opted-in using the steps outlined at the link above.

Solution Maintenance

Everbridge is committed to maintaining the highest levels of performance and availability of our solution. There are occasions, however, when the service may be interrupted for planned or event‐driven maintenance. Defined below are the different categories of solution maintenance and the standard maintenance windows and advisory periods.

Planned Maintenance

Any maintenance activity with an anticipated impact to system performance, availability, or functionality is considered Major Maintenance and we provide a maintenance notification to our customers at least five business days prior to such maintenance as outlined in the Service Advisories section above. Our standard maintenance window for Major Maintenance is on Wednesdays between 6:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Maintenance with little to no anticipated risk of user impact is considered Minor Maintenance. Such maintenance may be conducted anytime Monday through Thursday. A maintenance notification will not be provided for Minor Maintenance.

Unplanned Maintenance

In order to prevent or mitigate potential service degradation, we may occasionally need to conduct maintenance without being able to provide an advance notification. Such maintenance is considered Unplanned Maintenance and we would provide a maintenance notification to our customers at least two business days prior to such maintenance as outlined in the Service Advisories section above. This maintenance will also be limited to our standard maintenance window on Wednesdays between 6:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Emergency Maintenance

If a service degradation does impact the Everbridge solution, our first priority is to restore service and resume normal operation. Under such circumstances, we may need to perform restorative maintenance. Such maintenance is considered Emergency Maintenance and may only be conducted on an as-needed basis, with explicit Senior Operations Management approval. Due to the nature of such maintenance, it may be conducted without any prior notice and any time of the day.

Incident Management & Root Cause Analysis

Everbridge understands that our customers rely upon our platform for assured critical communications, especially for health, safety, and critical business processes. We take incidents extremely seriously and work non-stop to resolve customer-impacting incidents. To provide a high level of service to our customers, Everbridge utilizes operational processes based upon the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, a de facto industry standard for IT service management. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a component of the ITIL problem management process.

As outlined above, our first priority with any service degradation is to restore service and resume normal operation. Once service is restored the focus changes to analysis, determining the root cause, and preventing recurrence. Prevention may contain actions to improve detection through monitoring, building out additional or replacement infrastructure, or developing software enhancements. It may take several days of investigation and cross-team coordination to develop the appropriate course of action to best serve our customers. Engineering teams from many different disciplines become involved in the resolution and review of incidents that are impactful to the platform and to our customers.

You may request a copy of the RCA document for any Everbridge service degradations where the root cause was determined to be within the Everbridge solution. The Everbridge goal is to be able to provide a documented RCA after the resolution of a critical event within five days of a request. This document will contain the following:

• event start date
• event end date
• timeline of events
• root cause of the event
• corrective action(s) to restore service

An RCA is not provided if the root cause of the reported issue is determined to be outside of the Everbridge solution and therefore outside of the direct control of Everbridge. Examples of such issues would be regional telecom or Internet provider issues impacting the delivery of messages to recipients in a particular location or on a particular downstream telecom/wireless or Internet provider.