Guidance to limit support contacts

[bradrydzewski]

Service Limits means any limits on use of Developer's support services specified on the Order Form, such as the number of Customer Personnel who may contact Developer for support, or the maximum number of Support Requests Developer will respond to per month.

this section is great, I was just wondering how you would go about limiting the number of support contacts. It might be nice to include some common verbiage directly in this section:

a) If the Order Form specifies a limit to the number of support contacts [...]
b) If the Order Form specifies a limit to the number of support hours per month [...]

the only reason I suggest this would be to reduce the possibility of someone like me crafting incorrect or vague wording in the order form.

[kemitchell]

@bradrydzewski We definitely want to provide clear definitions for vague terms and concepts that will likely show up on order forms. But I'm not sure I have much to offer.

When I included that bit about contacts per month, I had in mind the kind of pricing we see when license and support get sold in tandem. Those order forms often have a table like:

Item	Quantity	Price	Discount	Total
Such-and-Such Enterprise	10	$10	2%	$80
Enterprise Support	10	$2	50%	$10
				$90

What does it mean to have quantity 10 of support? Many, many forms don't say. And those that do don't reliably agree. The best we can say is there's some vague notion of 1:1 user quantity and support quantity. In normal circumstances the vendor won't sell different license and support quantities.

Intuitively, the pricing differential is easy to justify: More users means more problems means more money.

Do you think it's safe to include a provisions that clarifies that "users" on the order form means number of folks entitled to reach out via the support channels? We might go an extra step, and allow the order form to specifically override the terms:

If the Order Form specifies a number of users, that number of part the Use Limits. Unless the Order Form defines "users" otherwise, Customer may only allow up to that number of individuals to send Support Requests at any given time.

That's just a quick sketch, not final language.

[bradrydzewski]

What I am thinking of is more along the lines of Named Contact. It is common for large contracts to limit the number of individuals in an organization that can use premium support (phone, chat, etc).

Example from Amazon terms:

Business hours* access to Cloud Support Engineers via email. One named contact can open an unlimited amount of cases

Example from Atlassian terms:

Premier connects our top tier engineers with the customer and in order to ensure the best outcomes we limited the number of individuals within an account per $35,000 to three named contacts.

and

You will designate up to two (2) individuals to serve as key points of contact with the TAM (the “Account Representatives”). You will submit all your requests through your Account Representatives, and we will rely and act upon each Account Representative’s instructions. You will ensure that your Account Representatives have baseline technical knowledge of the Atlassian Products.

Example from Workday terms:

Customer’s Named Support Contacts may submit cases to Workday Support via the Customer Center. Named SupportContacts must be trained on the Workday product(s) for which they initiate support requests.

[kemitchell]

That's a valid kind of term to want, too. But backing up, we just misunderstood each other about what "support contacts" on an order form should mean. Which is pretty good evidence that we shouldn't m make either your meaning or mine the default under the legal terms.

In the medium term, we will add a template order form to this repo, as a starting point for folks preparing actual deals. Perhaps guidance on how to write out different contact-point standards belongs in the order form template, and not in the legal terms.