[General] Online Ticket System

We often get questions and inquiries directed to us that are e-mailed directly to us and not through our online ticket system. The online ticket system is an important aspect of the service that we provide.

Our online ticket system has recently been redesigned to make it easier to complete and submit a ticket. You can always access our Account Management Area at:

http://www.amshelp.com
(You may want to bookmark this link for future reference)

Where there are two links to our ticket system, the Contact Form and Support Ticket link. Either of these links will take you to a page where you can submit a ticket.

Sending us a direct e-mail, bypassing the online ticket system, is not recommended. The four main reasons for this are:

• Account ownership verification

• Anti-spam and spam overload

• Cataloging and referencing

• Receipt confirmation

Account ownership verification
For some tasks, whether they be support, sales, or billing related, require some form of verification that you are who you say you are. For example, if I wrote in to my host requesting that the MX records for domain name to be changed, I would be flabbergasted and upset if they did not require some form of account verification before making the changes. The MX records tells the rest of the Internet where to deliver mail that is address to your domain name. If no verification is asked for to validate the request, then potentially anyone could make this request, which is a huge security issue.

Sending your account password in plain e-mail is never recommended. Our online ticket system uses SSL to secure the connection and uses encryption to encrypt the password fields. By using the online ticket system you can enter your account password, or the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for the account, and we can verify that you are in fact the owner of the account, which can be used to validate your request.

Anti-spam and spam overload
Nobody likes spam. Everybody receives spam. We receive a ton of spam messages everyday. Weeding through these spam messages can be a daunting task. Our online ticket system bypasses all of our anti-spam filters and anti-spam measures and those messages go directly to our customer service representatives. This means that if you send us an e-mail, and choose not to use our online ticket system, you run a great chance that the message will get lost in our daily spam clutter. While we try to read through all of the e-mail messages we receive and pick out what is spam/what is not spam, what was incorrectly marked as spam/what was not incorrectly marked as spam, etc, this task can be simplified if clients would just use our online ticket system, and then those messages would go directly to our customer service representatives where the issue can be looked at and resolved quickly. By choosing not to use our online ticket system you may experience delays in having your inquiry looked into, because we cannot continuously monitor the messages that bypass our ticket system. Simply put, inquiries that are raised through our online ticket system get a greater priority.

It is worth mentioning that once a ticket has been opened, you can continue to reply back on that ticket, just be sure to preserve the subject line (Having “Re:” in the subject is acceptable). Our ticket system works by recognizing and letting open ticket messages pass through our e-mail system and go directly to our customer service team. Once a ticket is opened, replies to that ticket are designed to pass through our system.

We do ask that you keep a ticket to one issue. If you open a ticket and then two weeks later experience a completely separate issue that you want looked into, please open another ticket. This helps with the third point.

Cataloging and referencing
This is more of an internal aspect. When you submit a ticket through our online ticket system it is assigned a unique ID number. This allows us to catalog and reference that ticket ID to a particular issue. If a support ticket is raised and our techs and system administrators need to collaborate on that issue, they can easily tell each other that this is in reference to ticket number xxxxxx.

This also allows us to catalog issues. If you experience an issue that perhaps we have not dealt with before, we can make a note of this and the ticket ID and catalog it. This way if someone else experiences this issue in the future, we can refer back to this ticket ID to see what steps were taken to resolve the issue.

Likewise, having the ticket ID helps you – the client – because you have something to reference later. Which brings us to our fourth reason.

Receipt Confirmation
Our online ticket system is designed to provide the submitter with a receipt, a confirmation that the ticket was received. This receipt confirmation works similar to an auto-responder, but it is not the same as an auto-responder.

We have one server that sits in our service cabinet in our office. All online ticket submissions are sent directly to that server. That server then distributes out the ticket to the appropriate customer service area. Once it has done this, it sends a confirmation message back to the ticket submitter, letting them know that the ticket has been received and dispatched to the appropriate party. This is why there may be a slight delay between submitting a ticket and receiving the ticket receipt confirmation.

This receipt confirmation serves two main purposes. One, it lets you know that we did receive your message and that we will be responding shortly. If you do not receive the receipt confirmation, then this likely means that you did not successfully complete the online ticket form or that you used an e-mail address that is unable to receive messages, in which case you won’t receive our replies from our customer service representative. You may want to check your spam box for delivery of the receipt confirmation message. If you do not receive a receipt confirmation within 10 to 15 minutes of submitting the ticket, then go ahead and submit a new ticket as we may not have received your first try.

Secondly, the receipt confirmation message provides you with details about the ticket. The receipt confirmation message will be sent to the e-mail address that we will be replying to and it also gives you the ticket ID of that request. If, for some reason, you never receive a reply back from our customer service team or if you wish to further reference the incident, you can always refer to that ticket ID.

These are all reasons why we stress using our online ticket system. Because we want to insure that you get quality and prompt service for any issue or question you might have, using the online ticket system insures that this will happen. Not using the provided online ticket system causes you to run risks in how your inquiry will be received and handled.

Scott