Partners: definition & support extent

Partners definitons

Solution Partner: This means that you are a certified Sales Layer Partner and, in addition to the collaboration agreement you have with Sales Layer for belonging to our official partner network, you have signed a separate contract with the client that establishes the services agreed between you and them.

The Solution Partner modality implies that the partner is responsible for customer management such as user training, providing the agreed services such as consulting, integrations, PIM setup, etc., as well as, any upgrades that the customer may need along the project progress.

Sales Layer will provide support upon the rules described in the below section under “Support and limitations”, and it will assign a CSM with which you can plan for periodical checkups, share relevant account information, or manage any account upgrades, as described under “Customer Success”. In this case, the assigned CSM will not have direct contact with the customer, and the partner will intermediate any communication between the customer and Sales Layer regarding support or any other account-related matters.

Technology partner: This means that you have signed a contract with a Sales Layer customer where a service between you and the customer has been agreed upon, and it is limited to it. In this case, Sales Layer is responsible for customer management as well as, user training or any other account-related matters. The partner will be limited to providing customer support on their provided-only services/integration. If you wish, we offer you the possibility of enrolling in our free Partner certification program to gain a broader knowledge of the platform.

Out of scope:

Direct management into the customer’s account (Managed services).
Setup of channels and direct implementations (web, e-commerce...).
Platform customization.
Support for third-party (non-Sales Layer official Partners) developers.

Partner training

As a Sales Layer Solution Partner, you will pass a certification process on the use of Sales Layer products, where you will learn the principles of how to operate with the PIM and will be required to pass an exam to obtain your certification badge.

With the first client, Sales Layer will accompany you during the kick-off and will offer additional support to get the project started.

Two teams will collaborate in the management of your project:

1. Customer Success:

The Customer Success team will keep you up to date on new features and will seek to ensure that you get the most out of the tool. Platforms updates are also published in the “Updates” section of the Support Center: https://support.saleslayer.com/category/updates

With the Customer Success team, you will schedule periodical meetings, usually on a quarterly basis, to control your assigned accounts, present new features, and share information on the roadmap.

These meetings are particularly significant for sharing any relevant account information with the aim of assessing customer health by anticipating possible risks.

Periodically, the Customer Success team also conducts quality surveys with customers where the results will be shared with you.

2. Customer Support:

Unlike the Customer Success team, the support team has greater availability to resolve your questions and incidents by having a team dedicated to addressing them and prioritizing them appropriately.

Their first and second levels of attention will ensure that you have at your disposal the necessary documentation resources for using the tool and that the platform works properly.

Support definitions

Business hours: This means the regional hours of operation excluding national holidays. Business hours are between 08:00 AM - 06:00 PM CET.

Incidents: comply Critical, Major, or Minor as defined in the below section.

Support Center: This means the online documentation portal available at https://support.saleslayer.com which is regularly updated with platform information.

Response time: This means the time from the submission of a Support ticket until the first response of a non-automatic message.

Support services: This means the support provided via Support Ticket according to the contracted plan. The plan will include some annual support hours available through the mentioned system.

Support services

Each partner has several hours according to the characteristics of their clients. They are deducted most favorably according to the following rules:

Opening of conversation: A minimum of 15 minutes is deducted from the total.
We will always seek to guide you to the appropriate documentation since the objective is for the user to be autonomous with the platform as a SaaS service.
Incidents are not counted as support hours and therefore are not deducted from the total contracted hours.

Incidents classification

Critical	Situations of data loss and the impossibility of recovery through the backup copies available on the platform. The client cannot access the PIM system and it affects all users. The risk is that erroneous data ends up in e-commerce with a significant impact on the client's operations and no workaround is available.
Major	Certain core functions of the platform are affected or disabled and the use is severely degraded.
Minor	Core functionalities are not behaving as expected, while the incident has no major effect on the platform's usability.

In these situations, the risk will be evaluated by our support team and prioritized according to the nature of the incident.

Support: Response time and format

Support format is provided through the integrated ticketing system available in the PIM platform. You may be able to open a ticket either from your Partner account or from the customer's account. First-time response refers to regional hours of operation excluding national holidays during business hours.

Enterprise accounts: The general first non-automatic response time is 2 hours, while the average is less than 5 minutes during business hours.
Premium accounts: The general first non-automatic response time is 12 hours, while the average is less than 4 hours via the ticketing system during business hours.

Recommended user behavior when using the Support Tickets:

We recommend that you first check our Support Center to find the answer to your question.
If you cannot find what you are looking for, you can submit a Support Ticket enabled through the PIM platform system so that we can investigate accordingly and support you further.

Support handling

Responses to the support ticket will be provided during business hours.
During a conversation, the time from query to response might not be immediate as it will depend on the team queue, as well as, on the investigation time required to find an answer to your question.

Sales Layer support performs the following actions for each inquiry:

Guide to our documentation if the inquiry relates to information available in our Support Center.
Perform diagnostic work: For Sales Layer to initiate diagnostic work, the partner must provide sufficient information on the account affected, the followed steps, and expected results to be able to replicate the behavior.
Inform the partner if the described situation behavior is correct and also according to our platform functioning.
If the concern is identified as an incident, the partner will be informed accordingly and the incident will be prioritized upon criticality.
The support team will follow up on the progress and confirm incident resolution when released.

Out of support:

The review of custom-built formulas: we may only validate that the formula logic is functioning properly.
Integration with third-party services: only the validation that the data is being exported correctly through the connector is covered.
Assistance to issues caused by performance degradation due to the customer's Internet or server provider.
Use cases and custom modifications are not within the scope of the general PIM operation documentation.

Integrations support

Sales Layer support is limited to the PIM platform only. Assistance with a third-party service or integration is limited to our Support Center documentation and verification that the data is being exported in the appropriate way.

It is possible to support partners in their integrations, by following these rules:

They have been certified in accordance with our certification program.
They have sufficient technical knowledge with the ability to interpret/modify advanced API setups/plugin code.
Have direct access to the customer’s production account.
Integration support may have different response times if there is a need to escalate the matter to our internal technical team.

Note: If the Partner cannot offer a service at the customer’s request, the participation of a third partner may be necessary, and in this case, the selection will be agreed upon to ensure that the client can progress with the PIM project.

E-commerce integrations recommended practice:

It is essential to work with staging environments where the configuration is identical or the most similar to the production one to avoid duplicating technical support as well as to ensure reliable tests in the event of an incident.
Except in specific cases agreed upon, support will be given to the partner without involving the customer (to prevent the client from going directly to Sales Layer later).