Last Update: 10/21/2020
LoudCrowd Standard Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Capitalized terms that are not defined in this SLA shall have the definition provided in the Master Services Agreement (MSA).
Definitions
“Covered Down Time” means Down Time, as measured by LoudCrowd’s primary operational monitoring harness, which is not caused by Force Majeure, by Client’s acts, or by a third party who is not a subcontractor to LoudCrowd (e.g., third party Social Media Network or ISP), and which is not scheduled Down Time. While LoudCrowd shall use commercially reasonable efforts to take actions it deems appropriate to remedy and avoid such events, Covered Down Time does not include any reasonably unforeseeable interruption or degradation in service due to actions or inactions caused by third parties, including but not limited to DDoS attacks.
“Down Time” means time when a failure impairs or prevents: (a) for the LoudCrowd Community Subscription Services, the initiation of new user requests for LoudCrowd service and continued use of the Service is not available to at least 50% of Client’s End Users, (b) for the LoudCrowd Social Media Management Subscription Services, at least 50% of Client Users are unable to log in and/or are unable to write to, and/or receive messages from a primary social media network to which LoudCrowd connects (i.e., Instagram and/or Facebook), or (c) when LoudCrowd’s Performance goals, described below, are not achieved.
“Final Resolution” means a bug fix or update that corrects the Incident with a long-term solution that restores the original or equivalent functionality.
“General Release” means the most current, publicly available release of the respective LoudCrowd platform.
“Initial Response” means the first response and assignment of a Service Incident number by LoudCrowd to a Client’s submission of a Service Incident.
“Primary Function” means the core feature & functionality of the LoudCrowd Subscription Services. For the LoudCrowd Platform, this consists of the ability to monitor social media content (i.e. Instagram, TikTok), provide analytics, and manage customers on social media.
“Service Incident” means an individual request submitted to LoudCrowd on behalf of Client. Each request is uniquely identified with a case number.
“Severity Level” means the classification of an incident, with the different levels outlined in the table below.
“Temporary Resolution” means a workaround to the Service Incident that provides substantially equivalent functionality without material business disruption.
LoudCrowd Platform Availability Commitments
Hosting Facilities. LoudCrowd shall host the Platform at geographically distributed hosting facilities in the United States whose services include secure data centers, infrastructure, redundant bandwidth peering, redundant power with backup generators, and environmental control systems.
LoudCrowd shall monitor and maintain the Platform for all of the systems within LoudCrowd’s control necessary to maintain the Platform, including the monitoring of system utilization, storage utilization, and network utilization. LoudCrowd shall provide Client with 24×7 emergency contact channels for Severity 1 incident reporting. LoudCrowd shall promptly report all broadly impacting outages, including performance degradation, to our public status page. Broadly impacting is identified as approximately 25% of LoudCrowd’s subscription base.
99% uptime; Remedies: Credits and Termination. Subject to the provisions of this SLA, LoudCrowd shall provide 99% uptime measured calendar monthly. If in any calendar month during the applicable Subscription Duration, uptime falls below 99% (i.e., Covered Down Time exceeds 0.1%), then the following shall apply:
(a) Client shall be entitled to 2 minutes of service credit for each full minute of Covered Down Time, with a minimum of 1 hour of service credit per each calendar day on which Covered Down Time occurs; Covered Down Time in excess of 60 minutes within a given calendar day, Client shall be entitled to 1 day of service credit for each such calendar day (in each case an “Eligible Service Credit”). Eligible Service Credits shall be applied at the conclusion of the Subscription Duration. To receive Eligible Service Credits, Client must notify LoudCrowd no later than 30 calendar days from the time Client becomes eligible to receive such credits; and,
(b) Covered Down Time in excess of 8 hours in any calendar month shall constitute “Monthly Covered Down Time”. Three (3) events of Monthly Covered Down Time in any consecutive 6 month period shall constitute a material breach of the Order Form applicable to the affected Service, and Client shall have the right to terminate the applicable Order Form upon five (5) days written notice to LoudCrowd.
Reporting. Upon request, LoudCrowd shall provide monthly service availability reports. Additionally, upon request, Client shall be provided root cause analysis (“RCA”) reports for Covered Downtime. RCA reports will be delivered within 7 business days. In some cases, the RCA may be updated one or more times after it is delivered if additional information is discovered or third-party data becomes available.
Scheduled Down Time. LoudCrowd shall schedule Down Time with at least two“Final Resolution” which means a bug fix or update that corrects the Incident with a long-term solution that restores the original or equivalent functionality.
(2) days prior notice to the Client. Such Down Time shall be reasonably scheduled during typically minimal traffic hours and days for Client. However, LoudCrowd may schedule Down Time at any time of the day with shorter or no notice if LoudCrowd reasonably determines that a failure to act immediately could lead to material harm to either LoudCrowd or Client. LoudCrowd also reserves fifteen (15) minutes per day, at times of minimal traffic, for regular site maintenance with no prior notification. LoudCrowd Scheduled Down Time shall not exceed 8 hours per month.
Usage Limits. LoudCrowd’s Platform Availability Commitments (“PAC”) shall apply to Client as long as: (i) Client is current on its payment obligations to LoudCrowd, and (ii) if applicable, Client’s actual usage remains under the applicable Usage Limits specified in the Order Form
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Plans – During the term of the Agreement, LoudCrowd will have a disaster recovery plan in place for the hosting location from which the Platform is provided. If LoudCrowd’s disaster recovery plan is invoked, LoudCrowd will restore the Platform to the service availability service level described above in accordance with the requirements of such plan. In addition, LoudCrowd will have an annually tested business continuity plan in place to assist LoudCrowd in reacting to a disaster in a planned and tested manner.
LoudCrowd Support Commitments
Client service.
LoudCrowd shall provide Client service in accordance with the contracted support level. The information below is applicable to all support levels.
Submitting requests. Client must submit Client’s request via online ticket through the Community Case Portal. To access the portal, visit the LoudCrowd Community and go to “Case Portal”. Where available, a ticket may also be filed In-App through the product platform. Support levels above standard may change the request options.
Note: On Severity Level 1 service requests only, LoudCrowd accepts email reports to [email protected]
Support Conference Requests. In order to provide all of our Clients with the highest quality of support possible, LoudCrowd has standing guidelines on providing conference call support.
Hours of operation. On Severity 1 Service Incidents, LoudCrowd hours of operation are 24/7/365. For all others, standard hours of operation for LoudCrowd Support are 9:00am – 5:00pm CST, Monday to Friday. Additional hours of operation are available with additional support levels and upon request.
Local language support. In order to provide the most consistent, high-quality support to our Client across the globe, all requests must be in English and LoudCrowd will respond in kind.
Response to service incidents. Unless otherwise classified through the case portal, LoudCrowd shall consider all issues to be Severity 3 by default. Upon triage, LoudCrowd shall, in good faith, determine the classification/severity of the service incident and shall respond within 1 business day. Any incident that meets the Severity 1 definitions below production system outage automatically triggers a 24×7 commitment until resolution. Lower priority issues are ranked based on impact to the Client and issue complexity. LoudCrowd shall make the final determination regarding Severity Level assignment.
Targeted Resolution: LoudCrowd does not commit to specific resolution times due to the varying levels of complexity involved any specific issue. LoudCrowd has targeted resolution timeframes specific to each support level and will commit appropriate resources to resolve the issue within those targeted timeframes.
Incident Severity Definitions & Classification
Incident Severity
Severity 1
Severity 2
Severity 3
Severity 4
Definition
A critical problem with the Platform in which any of the following occur: the Platform is down, inoperable, inaccessible or unavailable, the Platform otherwise materially cease operation; the performance or nonperformance of the Platform prevents useful work from being done with no workaround. Only production instances may be classified in this manner.
Client resources must be made available in Severity Level 1 situations and reasonably cooperate to help resolve the issue.
Severity Level 1 problems could have the following characteristics:
- A widespread production system outage resulting in Covered Downtime and the SaaS platform is completely unusable.
- System hangs or crash situations
- Inability to reach the system due to LoudCrowd networks
- Significant data loss or data corruption
- Data security breaches, reported by either Client or LoudCrowd internal security
- Primary functionality unavailable or system is unable to operate, even on a severely restricted basis.
A problem with the Platform in which any of the following occur: the Platform are severely limited or degraded, primary functions are not performing properly, the situation is causing a significant impact to a high percentage of Platform licensed users’ operations or productivity; or the Platform have been interrupted but recovered, and there is high risk of recurrence.
Severity Level 2 problems could have the following characteristics:
For LoudCrowd Community or LoudCrowd JX
- Severely degraded performance
- Primary functionality unavailable but the system is able to operate in a severely restricted fashion.
- Issue is persistent and affects many Users and primary functionality.
- All critical or high level security vulnerabilities
- Analytics or data unavailable
- No reasonable workaround is available.
A problem with the Platform in which any of the following occur: the problem impacts primary business operations, but there is a work around available that may not scale effectively; the problem is localized or has isolated impact and can easily be circumvented; customers work has minor loss of operational functionality.
Severity Level 3 problems could have the following characteristics:
- Performance degradation
- Incorrect data on reports
- Incorrect product behavior with business impact
- Short-term workaround is available, but not scalable.
A minor or cosmetic problem with the Platform in which any of the following occur: the problem is an irritant, affects non-essential functions, has minimal impact to business operations; the problem is an operational nuisance; the problem results in documentation errors; or the problem is any other problem that is not classified as above, but is otherwise a failure of the Platform to conform to its specifications as described in the Documentation.
Severity Level 4 problems could have the following characteristics:
- Error messages with easy workaround
- General requests for advice on product usage
- Clarification on product documentation or release notes
- Product enhancement request
- Questions on product functionality or configuration
Severity 1 Case Submission and Handling. For all Level 1 severity issues (“Severity 1”), Client shall engage via email to [email protected] and a Severity 1 case will be automatically be logged. LoudCrowd shall provide electronic updates to Client regarding its progress toward resolution of Severity 1 issues at regular intervals, initially targeted to be no more than every 60 minutes (or as the parties may otherwise agree) until a resolution or work-around has been provided. Reproducible errors that cannot promptly be resolved will be escalated to LoudCrowd engineering personnel for further investigation and analysis before being returned to Client for additional information. Updates will be provided via email.
A multi-party bridge line may be established by LoudCrowd, in its discretion, to resolve a Severity 1 issue involving joint/multiparties. Where two or more customers are experiencing similar Severity 1 issues, Client may be invited to join a multi-Client bridge line established by LoudCrowd to communicate updates to multiple customers in a scalable manner. If a bridge line is not established, LoudCrowd may provide email and/or telephone updates to Client regarding its progress toward resolution of the Severity 1 issue at regular intervals, initially targeted to be no more than every 30 minutes until a resolution or work-around has been provided.
Security Vulnerabilities. LoudCrowd commits to reviewing all security issues in an expedited manner. Once a report is deemed a security concern by LoudCrowd’s security operations team, issues are moved out of the standard incident process for higher priority.
Cooperation & Error Reproduction. LoudCrowd must be able to reproduce errors in order to resolve them. Client agrees to cooperate and work closely with LoudCrowd to reproduce errors, including conducting diagnostic or troubleshooting activities as requested and appropriate. Client agrees to provide LoudCrowd with all information and materials reasonably requested by LoudCrowd for use in replicating, diagnosing and correcting an error or other support issue reported by Client. Also, subject to Client’s approval on a case-by-case basis, users may be asked to provide remote access to their LoudCrowd application and/or desktop system for troubleshooting purposes.
In submitting a service incident (each individual request being a “Service Incident”) to LoudCrowd, Client will send a complete and accurate report that includes (a) a reasonably detailed description of the request, together with any supporting information that Client’s engineers believe will assist LoudCrowd in its diagnostic process; (b) any error message(s) or other message(s) generated by the system in association with the request; (c) any applicable trace files and/or logs; (d) a test case or instructions necessary to demonstrate the request; and (e) identification of any additional information or artifacts (such as dumps, logs, etc.) that are, or can be made, available. LoudCrowd may request specific information in addition to the aforementioned requirements for submission. Client acknowledges that the implementation of General Releases provided by LoudCrowd may be necessary to ensure the proper operation. LoudCrowd shall not have obligations under support services to remedy issues that will be fixed by implementation of that General Release.
Customizations. LoudCrowd commits to working through core Subscription Services issues, however, customizations are not included under Standard Support. Changes implemented by the Client’s development team or the LoudCrowd professional services teams are covered only under advanced support levels.
Appendix 1: LoudCrowd Support Levels
Please see Client’s Client success manager or account executive for all current available options with regards to LoudCrowd Support Services. LoudCrowd offers a variety of support levels to accommodate the needs and preferences of its customers. All Customers must have an active subscription and support level to be eligible to request assistance. All support levels are subject to change by LoudCrowd.