Welcome to Support
As the leading warehouse management solution, 3PL Central understands the necessity of providing you and your business with exceptional support to assist in day-to-day operations. Our Support team is focused on assisting your operations by providing industry-leading, personalized support services, as well as an unmatched WMS support experience. We are here for you. We are here to accelerate our value to you through command of our products and to help you provide amazing service to your customers. Support strives to provide experiences that exceed expectations to help your company be successful because your success defines our success.
We encourage you to take a few moments to review this guide to better understand our teams, our processes, and your role within these.
Please be advised, our Support services are available to direct customers of 3PL Central only. If we receive a call or case from one of your customers, we will request that they contact you and are happy to assist them in reaching you. This is for your benefit to ensure workflows and rules you've set for your customers are followed.
As a heads up, we may periodically make changes to this content as needed to ensure your support experiences exceed expectations.
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- Hours of Operation
- Know Who to Contact
- Support Contact Methods
- Support Case Severity and Response Targets
- Support Case Workflow
- Support Case Statuses
- Support Case Resolution and Closure
- Escalations
Hours of Operation
Standard hours of operation are from 5am to 5pm Pacific time.
After-hours support (between 5pm and 5am on weekdays, and all day on posted holidays and weekends) is available for Severity-1/Mission Critical situations only—this support must be initiated by telephone.
We define Severity-1 or Mission Critical situations as extremely urgent matters, such as a total system outage, or any other event that is severely impacting your operations. You can learn more about Severity types below.
3PL Central offices are closed in observance of the following U.S. holidays:
- New Year's Day
- Presidents' Day
- Memorial Day
- Day before Independence Day
- Independence Day
- Labor Day
- Thanksgiving Day
- Christmas Eve
- Christmas Day
- New Year's Eve
During these closures, after-hours support is available for Severity-1 issues, by telephone only.
Know Who to Contact
We have a number of resources you can use to engage with 3PL Central, so it's important to understand who you should contact for different circumstances.
When to contact Support
Support should be your first destination under the following circumstances:
- You have questions regarding functionality in the system.
- You feel there is an unintended issue, or “bug”, in the system.
- You are following up on a case that you don’t see in the Support Portal.
As a summary rule of thumb, you should contact Support when your question has to do with a feature that is already available to you in 3PL Warehouse Manager. Most new features requests can be directed to your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
When to contact your CSM
Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) is vital when it comes to managing your contract and relationship. If your request deals with adding features, engaging in paid services, discussing your subscription, discussing your invoice, or escalating more than one case at a time, then you should reach out to your CSM.
If you find that you need to contact another department for any other reason, we’d encourage you to reach out to Support via a phone call to receive the quickest answer.
When to post in Community
3PL Central Community is a platform we created so that you can communicate with other 3PL Warehouse Manager users, stay informed on internal product updates, and share feedback on new features.
You should post in Community when you have a general workflow question, you are interested about the general direction of the product (ex: What’s the plan for SmartScan in 2021?), or you see a familiar 3PL Central name and would love to just chat.
When to submit a Product Idea
Product Ideas is the newest addition to 3PL Warehouse Manager and serves as a tool for you to submit enhancement ideas directly within the product. You should submit a product idea any time you have a request for a feature or functionality that does not currently exist in the product.
If you have a question about whether a feature currently exists in the system, don’t hesitate to reach out to Support so an agent can help you investigate and direct you to Product Ideas as needed.
Support Contact Methods
There are three different ways to contact our Support team, each reviewed below.
Telephone
888-309-7114 or 888-375-2368 (ext. 2)
When calling, please be prepared to provide the following:
- Your name and contact details
- Your company name
- Business impact and context for the issue you're experiencing, including specific project schedules at risk
- The steps that need to be taken to recreate the scenario—the system is highly flexible, so in order to ensure we're troubleshooting effectively, we always need the exact steps you've taken
- Relevant reference/transaction numbers
- Whether functionality was working previously and what changed
- Any relevant error messages received
- When and how often the problem is occurring
In an instance where we are unable to offer you an immediate resolution to your issue on the phone, we will create a support case for further correspondence regarding your issue and to communicate steps we’ll be taking to resolve the matter as expeditiously as possible.
When calling, please keep in mind that the entire team's phone line will ring 4 times (~20 seconds). We highly recommend that, in the unlikely event that you are unable to reach a representative in that time, you stay on the line to leave as much information as possible in a voicemail. We are committed to calling back all voicemails within the hour that they are received.
Support Portal
3PL Warehouse Manager's Support Portal is a place where you can view all open and closed cases tied to your warehouse account, create a support case, and track your overall support experience. The Support Portal is accessed within 3PL Warehouse Manager via the Customer Central drop-down list:
Note: If you click on that link and see that you don't have access to our Support Portal, please contact your Warehouse Admin who can communicate with your Customer Success Manager to allow you access.
Once in the Support Portal, you can navigate to Create a New Case to submit a new support case. To learn more about what's available in the Support Portal, please see Navigating the Support Portal or read our list of Support Portal FAQs.
General Support or Technical Questions: support@3plcentral.com
API Questions: api@3plcentral.com
EDI Questions: edi@3plcentral.com
Questions regarding any contracts: Contact your Customer Success Manager
To be compliant with security regulations and protect you and your customers, never share credentials (usernames and passwords) in plain text. Instead, indicate to Support that you have confidential credentials to share and ask the Support Engineer for best practices to do so securely. Emailing Support will automatically create a case for you in our case management system and prompt an automatic reply with a case number for your reference. We’ll take care of getting you to the right specialist, in which we strictly adhere to our initial response goal of 8 hours. Please see more about our response targets below.
In your initial email, please provide the specific screens, steps, reference/transaction numbers, and any other details relevant to the issue being experienced. Attaching screenshots will also help expedite troubleshooting.
Please note that because all emails directed to our Support email address opens a new support case, we ask you to be mindful of including Support on ‘FYI’ emails unless you need us to take direct action. If 3PL Central cannot add anything to the technical discussion of the issue at hand, Support should not be included in the email thread.
If you intend to open a support case with multiple people included on the email, it is best practice to include them after you receive your case confirmation email. This will ensure that others’ responses will also be included on your case.
Support Case Severity and Response Targets
|
Level |
Description |
Response Targets |
|
Severity-1* |
Platform is down and core business modules are non-functional. |
< 2 Hours |
|
Severity-2 |
Core functions are severely limited but still workable. Increased attention is needed. |
< 4 Hours |
|
Severity-3 |
Errors are present, or a general question is being posed. Considered non-urgent. |
< 8 Hours |
*Severity-1 cases should always be initiated by telephone.
Support Case Workflow
Once you submit a support case, it is assigned to a Frontline Support Engineer. The Support Engineer will verify the business impact and related severity of the issue, confirm the technical problem, work on troubleshooting/isolating the problem, and attempt to reproduce the behavior.
While approximately 90% of all customer issues are resolved by our Frontline Support team, cases are sometimes assigned to a Backline Support Engineer, an EDI Specialist, or an API Specialist if your case is specific to one of these specialists. If this is the case, they will develop a resolution plan and then act as the single point of contact through case resolution.
Please note that you can email EDI and API directly at edi@3plcentral.com or api@3plcentral.com to engage with those teams directly.
Support Case Statuses
|
Status |
Definition |
|
Not Started |
The case has been received and is awaiting review by an agent. |
|
Closed |
The customer has informed us that the topic of the case is no longer occurring, or both parties have agreed to an amicable course of action that does not require new development action. (See below for further definition.) |
|
Waiting on Customer |
Our team has given a response, and we are awaiting correspondence from the customer to move the case forward. |
|
New Customer Reply |
The customer has responded, and the case is waiting for the agent to re-engage. |
|
Pending Review* |
The case is currently being evaluated by our development team. The Support Engineer, with input from other departments, has found that the reported case requires active development work to resolve. |
|
In Progress |
Our team is actively engaging with the system to either replicate the issue or confirm/answer your question. |
|
Investigation |
We have had to ask for information outside of Support in order to fully inform the customer and are awaiting that information to update. |
|
Escalated |
The reported issue has been moved out of Frontline Support to be answered. This can indicate a question that is related to EDI/API or the case needs to be reviewed by a Product Manager. |
|
Re-Opened |
The case was in a status of Closed but was made active again by a message from an internal agent. |
* The Pending Review status is used to signify that the case in question will need to be looked into by our development team. The resulting automation and workflows should lead to an eventual release. If your ticket does not end with a release, you will be notified of the reasoning and further steps.
For those that are picked up by the development team for work, you will receive email notifications of the following two development statuses:
| In Progress | An engineer has begun active work on the issue assigned to your Support case. |
| Released | We have released the issue assigned to your Support case. We encourage you to verify the resolution is to your satisfaction so we can close the Support case. |
Support Case Resolution and Closure
A support case is considered resolved with one or more of the following resolutions:
- Redirection to another department vital to the communication of said resolution
- An acceptable interim solution
- A software update
- A correction to existing product documentation
- The submission of an Idea via Product Ideas
A case will be marked Closed upon customer confirmation of a resolution, or a lack of response from the customer over 18 days. In some circumstances (e.g., duplication of cases, out-of-office replies that generate new cases, unresponsiveness, spam services, or unprofessional behavior) 3PL Central will close a case without explicit customer consent. Case context is preserved and, of course, closed cases may be reopened at any time.
Escalations
A ticket can become Escalated for many reasons, and we want to help you understand who to communicate with if you feel that your ticket needs extra attention. The channel for your escalation, as long as you have a ticket with Support, should flow to the Support Manager if you feel that there is any discrepancy, lack of response, or heightened urgency to your case.
To escalate a case, we ask that you respond to the case you're escalating and either ask for a Support Manager (names below) or simply ask the case to be escalated to the manager.
- Myles Gann – Customer Support Manager
- Jocelyn Pade – Customer Support Manager
If you have an escalation with another department (ex: Account on Hold, Additional Service through Professional Services), Support will be glad to facilitate a hand-off to that department. However, we do recommend contacting the department directly when possible for speed and efficiency.
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