Hi everyone! My name is ​@Jenny Jenny and I am part of the Support Team at commercetools. I thought I could lift the curtain of how we work and how we can help you! 

You may ask yourself one of the following questions:

Where can I reach out to Support and what do I need to reach you?

• And there is a simple answer to this, anyone can reach out to us through our Support portal at support.commercetools.com you just need to create a user account with Jira. 

Where do I open a ticket then?

• Currently you have to choose a product once you reach our portal depending on the nature of your request. 
  • Composable Commerce → the core APIs including carts, orders, customers, business units, products and more, the surrounding SDKs, Merchant Center, Audit Log, Notifications sent for API calls. Import/Export APIs
    is the backend for anything based on commercetools
  • Frontend → API Hub, Frontend Delivery, Sandbox, Replicator. CI/CD, Studio, CLI
    is the base for your storefront looks and integrations
  • Connect → Connect API, Managed Infrastructure
    is a way to add functionality to Composable Commerce without needing to maintain hosting 
  • Checkout → Payment Connector, Applications
    is the commercetools powered checkout application handling the full checkout experience including the payment process

Why do I have to fill out so much information and get asked so many questions?

• To help you we need to know as much as possible about what you are experiencing/seeing and therefore we need as much information as possible. 
• We generally do not have access to your systems for most of our products and hence we may ask you to retrieve certain information for us.
• Please also keep in mind that we do not read all old tickets before answering a new one, so please link a prior ticket if it holds valuable information so we have context or just give us the extra context to help you as fast as possible. 

What if I do not know how to get the information I was asked for?

• Please just tell us about it! 
  The people we support have very different levels of knowledge and we try to make sure we cater our answers correctly but we just do not know what you know so tell us if you need help or more input from us.

How fast can I expect a response?

• This depends on your kind of inquiry as well as the kind of contract you have with us. 
• Generally we try to cater to tickets as quickly as we can, but busy times require prioritization. All Support requests should be answered within 48 hours Monday to Friday. If there is an issue you are reporting, that should be answered at least within 12 hours of reporting the issue also Monday to Friday. If there is a major problem on a live project/your end user facing infrastructure you can report an outage and we will reply 24/7 within an hour or less. (https://docs.commercetools.com/offering/support#services-per-severity-level)
• if you want to be prioritized first, you can talk to our Sales team or your Customer Success Manager to update to Premium Support which includes faster Support response times: https://docs.commercetools.com/offering/premium#the-added-value-of-premium-support

What can Support help me with?

• To put it simple: almost any product related question, issue or suggestion.
• Small questions on how to make something work with our products.
• Any question that is about how things work or what to expect about the specific product.
• Suggestions you may have to make our products even better for your use case.
• A problem/error message you are getting and you are stuck with. 
• A change to the implementation needed to the current set up that cannot be done on your end (we may be able to do it for you or can provide solid feedback or resources).
• An ongoing high impact problem to your live project/end user facing infrastructure.

What can Support not help me with?

• In depth consulting, as we are not aware of your full use case (but we can help to connect to our commercetools Professional Services team)
• Changes to your contract (your Customer Success Manager or Sales Representative are better suited to help with this)
• Issues caused by external infrastructure out of our control. 

What does commercetools do to make the busy times like Black Friday run smoothly?

• our engineering teams as well as our automatic set up are making sure we have enough resources to handle the incoming traffic
• throughout the year we evolve our incident process and make sure everyone is well trained and aware
• we make sure that we have well experienced support engineers, developers and more people on call at any time of the day during the Black Friday times 

What can I do to help us make things run smoothly?

• prepare everything ahead of time:
  • think about the busy time right after it happens like we do, so make sure you load test and prepare for high traffic times all year round
  • let everyone in your team know about how to work best with us together
•  stop deploying, load testing at least 2 weeks before Black Friday
• reach out to us via a support ticket or your Customer Success Manager to announce the peak load tests as well as big production events so we can make sure they run smoothly

What also makes commercetools Support special is this: if you reach out via an urgent incident ticket you get someone looking into the ticket who can also see the health of our APIs and other services right away and escalate to the developers and engineers on call as soon as possible. There is no call center or other levels in between that would slow down the escalation process, so be assured that if you reach out to us and communicate in any incident and support tickets with us, we will be able to assess and handle things right away. 

Hope you find this information useful, if you have any further questions, please let them in the comments!