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Support Principles

Supporting customers is a shared responsibility across the Nisien engineering team.

Our goal is to ensure issues are identified quickly, communicated clearly and resolved as efficiently as possible. We believe support works best when customers have direct access to the people responsible for building and operating the services they use.

This document outlines how support is provided by Nisien and the principles that guide our approach.

Principles

We aim to:

  • Respond quickly to operational issues.
  • Communicate openly throughout incidents.
  • Prioritise work based on customer impact.
  • Resolve the underlying cause where practical, not just the immediate symptom.
  • Continuously improve reliability and operational processes.

Support is not treated as a separate function. The engineers who build and operate systems are actively involved in supporting and improving them.

Scope

Support covers issues relating to the operation of services provided by Nisien, including:

  • Service availability and outages.
  • Bugs and unexpected behaviour.
  • Access and authentication issues.
  • Data ingestion problems.
  • Performance or reliability issues.
  • Operational incidents affecting normal usage.

Support does not include:

  • Feature development requests.
  • Custom analysis or consulting work.
  • Interpretation of outputs or findings.
  • Bespoke reporting or research activities.

Requests outside the scope of support may be handled separately through the appropriate commercial or account management process.

Support Channels

Issues can be reported through the agreed customer support channels, typically:

Slack

For day to day operational communication, issue reporting and incident updates.

Email

For issues that do not require real time discussion or where Slack is unavailable.

Support requests are monitored by the engineering team during support hours.

Ownership

Support requests are owned by the Nisien Product Engineering team.

Engineers operate a rotating goalkeeping responsibility to ensure customer issues, incidents and operational work are actively monitored and coordinated.

The goalkeeping engineer owns the resolution process but may involve additional engineers where specialist knowledge is required.

All issues remain tracked until resolution.

Prioritisation

Support requests are prioritised according to operational impact.

P1 Critical Incident

A critical service issue where a service or core functionality is unavailable.

Examples include:

  • Service outages.
  • Core ingestion failures.
  • Authentication failures preventing access.
  • Major incidents affecting all users.

P2 Major Issue

A significant issue that impacts customer workflows but does not completely prevent usage.

Examples include:

  • Data delays.
  • Performance degradation.
  • Failure of specific functionality.

P3 Minor Issue

A non critical issue where a workaround may exist.

Examples include:

  • Isolated functionality issues.
  • Minor defects.
  • Non blocking errors.

P4 Low Priority

Issues with minimal operational impact.

Examples include:

  • Cosmetic defects.
  • Minor usability concerns.
  • Small quality of life improvements.

Support Hours

Standard support is provided during UK business hours, Monday to Friday.

During active monitoring periods, live events or critical operational activities, additional engineering coverage may be provided where appropriate.

Incident Communication

For significant incidents, we aim to communicate early and provide regular updates throughout the investigation.

Updates are typically provided through the customer Slack channel and may include:

  • Acknowledgement of the issue.
  • Current investigation status.
  • Mitigation or workaround information.
  • Resolution confirmation.
  • Follow up actions where appropriate.

Our preference is to communicate frequently rather than wait until every detail is known.

Maintenance and Deployments

Services are continuously improved through regular deployments and operational updates.

Most improvements are delivered without downtime.

Where planned maintenance may affect availability, customers will be notified in advance wherever reasonably possible.

Continuous Improvement

Every support request, incident and operational issue is an opportunity to improve our services.

Where practical, we use incidents and support activity to identify root causes, improve monitoring, strengthen documentation and reduce the likelihood of similar issues occurring in the future.