How to Handle Product Offering Migration Tickets

Overview

You may encounter a support ticket from a paid customer who is migrating between offerings (SM and SaaS), and who at the time of the ticket has a paid license to only one of them. For example, they’re using a Self-managed instance and want to migrate to GitLab.com, and they only have an active Self-managed license (i.e. they have no paid SaaS subscription).

If the problem statement of the ticket involves the unpaid offering, that raises some issues:

• Do we support them, or is this out of scope?
• If we support them, then:
  • How do we configure the ticket so that it will be visible to SEs with the right focus area?
  • What level of support should they get?
  • How do we configure the ticket to have the right SLA?
  • How do we inform SEs that a decision has been made to support the customer?

In this type of situation, we do want to support the customer even though their contract does not require us to do so. Think of it this way: they are a paid customer and they’re going to continue to be a paid customer, so let’s give them a great customer experience rather than let technicalities get in the way.

How to make this work

1. Contact the customer to gather information
   1. First, explain that although they are only entitled to support on their current offering, we intend to support them anyway.
   2. Ask them to confirm what support level they intend to purchase on the new offering.
   3. Ask them the target date for completing the migration.
2. Open a Support Ops issue in this project:
   1. Specify that the request is to support a product offering migration.
   2. Specify the new support level to be applied to the organization.
   3. Specify the migration target date.
3. From here, Support Ops will:
   1. Add the support level tag to the org. There will then be two, so that the customer can get help on both their current and future offerings.
   2. Add text to the org notes explaining that the customer is migrating between offerings and that we have approved offering level support until target date.
4. Once Support Ops has completed their work, remove from the ticket the support level tag that does not belong. If you’re not sure which one(s) to remove, ping in #support_operations for help.

NOTE: If you assign yourself to a new ticket and find an internal note indicating that it involves a product offering migration, please take the final step described above: remove the support level tag that doesn’t align with the ticket’s problem statement.

For details on the Support Ops side of the process, please see Setting Up an Organization for an Offering Migration.

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