Contacting HCL Software Support

HCL Software Support provides assistance with product defects.

Before contacting HCL Software Support, your company must have an active HCL software maintenance contract, and you must be authorized to submit problems to HCL. The type of software maintenance contract that you need depends on the type of product you have:

If you are not sure what type of software maintenance contract you need, go to the Support page of the HCL Software Support.

Follow the steps in this topic to contact HCL Software Support:

Determine the business impact of your problem.
Describe your problem and gather background information.
Submit your problem to HCL Software Support.

Determine the business impact of your problem

When you report a problem to HCL, you will be asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are reporting. Use the following criteria:

Severity 1	Critical business impact: You are unable to use the program, resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate solution.
Severity 2	Significant business impact: The program is usable but is severely limited.
Severity 3	Some business impact: The program is usable with less significant features (not critical to operations) unavailable.
Severity 4	Minimal business impact: The problem causes little impact on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem has been implemented.

Describe your problem and gather background information

When explaining a problem to HCL, be as specific as possible. Include all relevant background information so that HCL Software Support specialists can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers to these questions:

What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
Do you have logs, traces, and messages that are related to the problem symptoms? HCL Software Support is likely to ask for this information.
Can the problem be recreated? If so, what steps led to the failure?
Have any changes been made to the system? (For example, hardware, operating system, networking software.)
Are you currently using a workaround for this problem? If so, please be prepared to explain it when you report the problem.

Preparing to call HCL support provides a list of the information that the HCL Support Center might need to help diagnose your problem. You can print a copy of this list and fill in the blanks before contacting HCL for service.

Submit your problem to HCL Software Support

You can submit your problem in one of two ways:

Contact Us: Submit your query in the HCL Software Support website.
By phone: For the phone number to call in your country, go to the contacts page of the HCL Customer Support. Under Contact us, click HCL support phone numbers to choose the phone number according to the name of your geographic region.

If the problem you submit is for a software defect or for missing or inaccurate documentation, HCL Software Support will create an Authorized Program Analysis Report (APAR). The APAR describes the problem in detail. Whenever possible, HCL Software Support will provide a workaround for you to implement until the APAR is resolved and a fix is delivered.

HCL publishes resolved APARs on the HCL product support Web pages daily, so that other users who experience the same problem can benefit from the same resolutions.

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