Let's take a look at the ways to get support on your Harmony software.

Most of the information you need in order to understand and use your software is contained in page guides and help tips.

Page guides display on the right side of any category view, and guide you through the related functions. Read through these for a basic understanding of the function.

If you select to not display a guide by default, you can still see it any time by selecting the, "Toggle Page Guide" icon.

You can add custom instructions to these page guides that are specific to your company, to further assist your users. To edit these, select Settings, then Menu & Guides, then Custom Page Guides.

While we're here, it's worth noting that you can also add custom procedure guides to the various functions in Harmony. This lets you outline your company-specific procedures, to ensure your users are processing things exactly how you want.

When you're editing a specific item in Harmony, like a place, person, agreement, transaction, work order, activity, document, or setting; individual inputs have help tips. These help tips describe the purpose of the input field and instructions for entering information.

Some help tips contain links to full articles and videos for advanced guidance.

If the guides and tips still leave you wanting more, select the Help icon for advanced system help options.

The easiest, quickest, and always free options to get answers to your questions are the, "chat" and, "search for answers" options.

Select the Chat bubble to talk to HERO Hank, an AI chatbot trained to provide answers to questions about Harmony. Enter your question in conversational format. HERO Hank will return step by step instructions to resolve the issue, along with a link to a relevant article. Hank's not perfect, but he is able to answer most questions quickly and accurately.

If you prefer to look for support by searching article content, enter your question into the, "Search for Answers" box and click or tap, "Search".

Results for your search show up below with a score indicating how likely they are to answer your question.

Some answers contain videos or PDF guides. These will be indicated with an icon on the right.

Select an answer to view the article. Select the, "Expand" icon to view the article in a full screen, which you can bookmark or print for future reference.

If you cannot find an answer to your question, you can use a support credit and submit a support request to our member support team. Click or tap the box to do so.

Before you proceed, a pop up displays showing the status of your support credits. 

This is going to be different for each account. Your account may include free credits for a certain time period, or a certain number of free credits granted. Once you've used up your free credits, each new support incident will be billed at the rate for your account type. This will all be displayed clearly before you submit a request.

Next, select the topic for support. It's important to select the right topic. Understanding a little about how we provide support will show you why. Let's take a side trip to cover this.

When you submit a support request, it's automatically routed to the first available support representative who is proficient in your account type and the type of support being requested.

If the content of the request does not match the topic of the request, it gets sent back into our support queue for triage. In general, this means it waits for a higher level support person to review it and assign it back to the proper support queue.

For you, this means you get the best, fastest response when you select the correct topic. Selecting the wrong topic slows things down for you. It's worth taking a moment to be sure you're indicating the best topic for your question or issue.

Once you've entered the specifics into the support box, there are a few other options worth taking a look at.

First is the option to, "Authorize HERO PM Member Support Access".

None of our support representatives can log into your account without specific authorization for each individual incident. This gives you and your owners peace of mind - your account is highly secure. 

If you need us to log into your account to view the issue, the only way for us to do this is with a support token. Without this token, we can only view your support request - we do not have access to your account to look anything up or provide any additional guidance.

If you want us to be able to access your account, select this button to generate a one-time token. It will be sent with your support request so we can log into your account as needed.

In case you're wondering, the token does not allow just anyone to access your account. Even with the token, we still need our own valid member support username and password. Generating and sending a token is safe and secure.

This token authorization process allows you to maintain compliance with numerous federal and state regulations.

Next is the option to attach files to your request. If you have screen shots or any other files you want to send us, this is where you attach them to the request. If you have multiple files, just zip them up and attach them.

Next is the option to authorize extra time. Each support credit covers up to 30 minutes of time to resolve the issue. If there's a situation where we can't get it done with a single credit, we'll let you know. This is usually limited to cases where your staff member really made a complicated mess and you need our help unraveling it all. Over 98% of our support incidents are resolved in 30 minutes or less.

Select Send Message to send the support request to our team.

At this point, your support request has been placed in the appropriate support queue based on your account and the selected topic. A message shows that it's pending in the queue.

Once we've processed it, it moves from the pending queue to a waiting support incident. In most cases, at this point you will have received an email or phone call with an answer, or a request for more information.

It's worth noting that when you submit a support request, we're going to reply in the most efficient way possible. If we need to send you step-by-step instructions, links, or guides, that will be an email. If we need to discuss things, that will be a phone call. In most cases, if we can't reach you by phone, we'll send an email instead.

When we send an email, you can reply directly to the email, as it contains all the information that connects it to this support incident and credit. Or, you can manage it all through Harmony.

If we have not yet replied to your request, this support incident displays in the section, "Support Incidents Awaiting HERO Support Review/Reply". 

Incidents can sit here while we're researching, attempting to replicate a problem, waiting for an external response from an integrated partner, or waiting for an internal response from our engineering or product teams.

If you have additional information for us, you can submit this with the, "Update Incident" icon.

Once we've communicated with you about the incident, either by email or phone, the incident moves to the section, "Support Incidents Awaiting Your Company Review/Reply". Although you've already heard from us, you can see the entire conversation log by selecting the, "Show Details" icon.

If you need to reply to us, select the, "Reply to Incident" icon. If we communicated by email, rather than phone, you can also just reply to the email.

If the information provided gives you exactly what you need, select the, "Mark Incident Resolved" icon. Note that if you've received an email response on the incident, this option to mark it resolved is also a link in the email.

When you mark an incident resolved, you also have the option to complete a quick survey to let us know how we did. If we were really awesome, or really awful, or really so-so, we want to know. These surveys give us valuable insight into how we can improve to serve you better. 

If one of our reps really went above and beyond for you, select this, and we'll throw a little extra cash their way - for fulfilling our mission of improving the lives of property managers.

You can also contact support outside of Harmony by sending an email or calling our toll free support number. Be aware that this is the slowest way to get support. Understanding what happens might help you see why.

When you email or call us, not in response to a specific support incident, we'll look up your account to see if you have any open incidents related to the request. If you do, we can directly address that incident. If you do not, we are limited to guiding you to log in to Harmony and open an incident in Help.

If the conversation, voice mail, or email do not make it clear what incident this is in reference to, we'll put it into our triage queue. From there, a representative will do their best to determine if this is related to an open incident or not. If it is, we'll assign it to the incident. If not, we'll contact you to open an incident. This triaging costs you time.

It's also worth understanding that we have specialists working on their queues around the clock. However, triage for new, non-emergency incidents typically only occurs during regular business support hours on weekdays. 

Put another way, if a person calls our support line and all reps are busy, and they leave a voice mail like, "This is Joe, please call me at 555-1212"; poor Joe is sending a message via the pony express, while everyone who is logging into their account, selecting a topic, and submitting their request is like sending a message via a SpaceX rocket.

Both are functional, but we'd much rather you get served faster and more efficiently.

Back to our earlier discussion, by submitting a support request with the relevant topic through Help in Harmony, your incident can be moved directly to a specialist queue. This is the short line. When you call or send a generic email, not in reply to an existing incident, your request has to sit in the long line, and the checkout for the long line only operates during business hours. We don't want you to suffer delays needlessly!

Coming back to the Help view in Harmony, you may have noticed, "Other Options". We'll cover each of these briefly.

Order a Project is used when you need to request custom work on your account. Our projects team does things like creating custom reports, making website edits that you don't want to do yourself, and more. If you need our team to do work on your account for you, select this option to go to Settings where you can outline the specifics of your project.

System status takes you to our status page where you can see if all of our systems are operating normally. Sometimes it feels like something is wrong, and it may be you or it may be us. Here's where you can determine that.

Report an Outage is for cases where a HERO system is down, and you're not sure if we know. This does not get logged to your account, nor will you get a reply. It does alert our engineering team, so we can look into the issue - in case we're not already on top of it.

Idea Zone is for cases where you don't need something from us, you want to give us something! This is your direct line into our business team and product development team, where you can share an idea for how Harmony could make your life even better. We thrive on the input and suggestions of our members.

That about covers it!

We trust that you are now comfortable with all of your options, and understand how to get the fastest, best support for any need that arises while you're using Harmony.