SparqFest has several support options to meet the unique support requirements for film festivals.

For 51 weeks out of the year, you are not that concerned about how quickly we respond to your queries or how quickly we address those queries. For that other week? Any delay is too long. 

SparqFest support offerings balance three separate concerns:

• Who handles user issues like a creator unable to resize an image or a user uploading a corrupt video?
• When is SparqFest available to handle the issues that are our responsibility?
• How quickly do we respond on the issues that are our responsibility?
• How can you receive better support during your festival dates without paying for that support all year?

Support Tiers

To fully understand our support tiers, we recommend reading the rest of this document to understand what we mean by things like “technical issues” versus “user issues” and how we staff for and prioritize support requests. If you just want to get the bottom line, however, here are our support tiers:

• Basic Support 
• Priority Support 
• Enhanced Priority Support 
• Virtual Technical Director 
• Staff Technical Director 

In addition, we have an add-on priority boost to increase your service levels on specific days:

• On-call Add-on 

Kinds of Issues

Each support tier deals with different kinds of requests in a different manner. The most basic support tiers, for example, limit our support to only failures in our software (technical issues). The higher support tiers, however, make most anything SparqFest's problem.

Technical Issues

When we refer to technical issues, we are specifically referring to issues that arise from the failure of our software to do what it is supposed to do. Technical issues do not include usability issues or user confusion with the technology.

We prioritize technical issues along the following lines:

0. New features - If you are looking for new functionality, you may file a ticket with our Zendesk platform at any time regardless of what kind of support you have. We prioritize new features based on overall customer demand and compatibility with our overall product roadmap.

1. Custom features - If you are looking for a feature to be added "right now" or something that just isn't of use to anyone but you, we can price out the addition of that feature (the estimate will not cost anything). To request a custom feature, file a ticket with our Zendesk platform. Custom site designs are considered custom features.

2. Minor Bugs - A bug is an issue where the site is not working as intended. We break bugs into two classes: minor bugs and major bugs. A minor bug is where the site is not working as intended, but you can accomplish the task with a workaround or you can otherwise wait for the next release for the bug to be fixed.

3. Major Bugs - A major bug is when the site is not working as intended and that failure is preventing users from doing critical tasks. You cannot wait for the next release for a fix and there is no workaround.

4. Site Down I - We have two levels of "site down". Under both circumstances, a site down is when significant functionality is unavailable to the target audience. The lower priority "site down" is called "Site Down I". It is when the site is down outside your festival dates or one of the portals is down during the festival dates, but the public site remains available.

5. Site Down II - When your public site is down during the festival dates, it's our highest priority issue regardless of what your paid support level is or what the support level of other customers is.

User Issues

Whether or not we will address other issues depends on your support level. How much support you are going to require for other issues depends largely on how technologically savvy your users (creators, audience, staff, and jury) are. 

The most common question that comes up under “user issues” is “The site won't accept my poster." We do not support these issues under our lower cost plans. Unless an extraordinary event occurs and we break something, the issue isn't with SparqFest—it's with the user trying to upload an image that is not appropriate for the context. Anything that falls under the user making a mistake or the user not understanding how to use the site is considered a “user issue”.

Other examples of common user issues are: uploading a corrupt video file, not being able to use the site from an unsupported browser, seeing “100% complete” in the creator portal and asking if they have submitted everything, etc.

Prioritization

All else being equal, we simply handle requests as they come in during business hours and make best efforts outside of business hours.

All else is rarely equal. Some issues are more important than others and some customers are paying us to focus more heavily on their support issues. We take the following items into consideration when a new issue comes into us:

What kind of issue is it? If it's a "Site Down II", we generally drop everything no matter what the customer is paying or what time of day it is. On the other hand, we will definitely de-prioritize a "new feature" request in favor of other issues and likely handle those dependent on the custom support level.

When does the ticket come in? Our highest priority is for support tickets that come in during our business hours during a festival dates. Unless you are paying for support outside of our business hours, we turnaround tickets outside business hours under a "best effort" model. See below for what "best effort" means.

Is the festival running? We prioritize festivals who are currently within their festival dates over festivals that are in the planning or post-festival stages.

What is the customer support level? If we have two "Site Down II" issues come in, we will handle the customer with the higher turn-around level before we address the issue for the customer who has only Basic Support.

We are most definitely not trying to squeeze you for support dollars, but we are trying to make sure that we have the revenue to pay the right amount of staff to meet our obligations to you.

We always try to exceed our promised service levels on a "best effort" basis. On a given day, we staff for what our customers have paid for. In other words, if you are paying for "on call" support, we will have someone around waiting for a trouble ticket during all hours of your festival. If you are not paying for that level of support, there may be no one looking at tickets at 10pm US/Central when you are having your awards ceremony. If someone else has paid for on-call, but no issues are coming up with that festival, the on-call staff might have time to deal with your issue on a prioritized basis.

In short, "best effort" simply means that if you haven't paid for the support, but someone happens to see the ticket and it does not interfere with their personal life, we'll work to take care of it quicker than what we have promised. But we will always meet the obligations for which you have paid or we will refund a portion of all of your paid support (depending on the circumstances).