Clarification on Escalation Process for Partner Support Cases

Hi ​@Hengfeng Ge,
 

The standard SLA for Partner Support cases is 24-48 hours for the initial response. If an issue requires escalation beyond this timeframe, reaching out through your CSM, Account Team, or Partner Account Manager remains the best path.

For customers with Premier Support, we recommend that the admin of the customer account or the customer account user opens the support case directly. This ensures the case is properly tagged for Premier Support, which includes the 4-hour response time for P2 cases. Customer admins and users opening cases directly is the most efficient way to receive priority handling.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any further questions.

Thank you for your response and for clarifying the Partner Support SLA. I really appreciate the details!

We’ll follow the Partner Support process for now and see how it works. However, based on my understanding, if a case is truly urgent, a 24-48 hour response time may not meet the customer’s needs.

Additionally, escalation typically happens when a case is already critical, which means it may occur outside of standard working hours. Since CSMs, Account Teams, and Partner Account Managers also have defined working hours, it raises a concern—if an escalation happens after hours, there may not be anyone available to assist. Would there be an alternative escalation path for urgent cases outside of business hours? Any recommendations on ensuring that time-sensitive issues get addressed promptly would be greatly appreciated.

Beyond this, I’d like to highlight a key customer experience concern. While sales teams drive business expansion, they still rely on Partner support to ensure smooth execution. If sales teams recognize the role of partners and customers trust partners for support, then why are partner-initiated cases treated as lower priority compared to customer-initiated cases?

Shouldn’t the customer-first approach focus on helping customers resolve issues as quickly and efficiently as possible? If a customer has fully authorized their Partner to open cases on their behalf, why can’t the case be processed under the customer’s support level? The customer has already paid for the service, and the level of support should not be downgraded just because the Partner is opening the case on their behalf.

In many other enterprise products, Partners can open cases at the customer’s support level, and case records are distinguished by account segmentation in the Partner portal. This ensures proper case tracking without compromising service quality. I truly hope DocuSign can consider improving the Partner case process in this direction.

Right now, we see that customers are too busy to open cases, so they ask sales reps, but sales teams are even busier and redirect the request to us, the Partners. However, when Partners open cases, they are downgraded to Plus Support, and even escalation channels are deprioritized. This creates unnecessary friction in the support process.

We would love to see improvements in this Partner Support model to ensure that customers, sales, and partners can work together seamlessly without unnecessary delays in critical issue resolution.

Looking forward to your thoughts, and thanks again for your time!

Best regards,

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