A field guide for those "Who do I ask?" moments
You have a community question. Excellent! But where should it go? Should you contact your Success Advisor? Open a Support ticket? Search the knowledge base? Here's how to get your question to the right team, and get to an answer faster.
The 10-Second Test
ASK YOURSELF: Am I trying to improve something, or is something not working as expected?
- "How can we get more value from our community?" Contact your Success Advisor.
- "Why is this feature throwing an error at me?" Contact Support.
- "I don't know which one this is yet." Start with your Success Advisor. We're excellent at helping questions find their natural habitat.
The Quick Comparison
Your Success Advisor | Customer Support |
|---|
Strategy, planning and outcomes | Troubleshooting and technical investigation |
"What should we do?" | "Why isn't this working?" |
Community growth and feature adoption | Bugs, errors and unexpected behavior |
Executive storytelling and proactive guidance | Configuration, access and issue resolution |
When to Contact Your Success Advisor
Your Success Advisor is your community strategy partner, idea workshop, reality checker and occasional professional brainstorm wrangler.
Reach out when you want help with:
Community Strategy
- Connecting community activities to business goals
- Prioritizing initiatives when everything feels like a priority
- Planning a launch, relaunch, expansion or rebrand
- Increasing adoption, participation or member retention
Engagement and Programming
- Improving member onboarding
- Creating recognition, advocacy or gamification programs
- Planning events, campaigns and participation challenges
- Re-engaging members who have quietly entered witness protection
Analytics and Executive Reporting
- Deciding which metrics actually matter
- Interpreting engagement trends
- Connecting platform activity to customer outcomes
- Turning "Here are 17 charts" into "Here are the three things leadership should know"
Platform Adoption
- Exploring features that support your goals
- Reviewing how other communities approach similar challenges
- Identifying underused capabilities
- Preparing for initiatives such as SSO, localization or integrations
- Finding the right training, documentation or internal specialist
Internal Alignment
- Gathering product feedback
- Coordinating the right Higher Logic resources for a larger initiative
PRO TIP: You do not need a fully formed plan before contacting your Success Advisor. "We know engagement needs help, but we don't know where to start" is a perfectly respectable starting point.
When Support Should Get the Call
Support is the right destination when something technical needs to be investigated, reproduced or fixed.
- A feature isn't behaving as documented
- You see an error message or error code
- Members cannot log in or access something they should
- An SSO, email, API or integration workflow is failing
- A setting or configuration isn't producing the expected result
- A page, dashboard or feature won't load
- Data/metrics/analytics appear missing or technically incorrect
- You suspect you've found a bug
- An issue is affecting multiple members
- Your community is unavailable or experiencing a critical problem
Your Success Advisor can remain informed and help with communication or business context, but opening a Support ticket puts the issue directly into the technical queue with the details needed for investigation.
About Those Fix Timelines...
Once a technical issue is reported, it's natural to ask: "Great! When will it be fixed?"
THE HONEST ANSWER MAY INITIALLY BE: We don't know yet.
Neither Support nor your Success Advisor can promise a fix date before the issue has been fully investigated. That isn't evasiveness; it's responsible troubleshooting. A confident guess is still a guess wearing a blazer.
A timeline can depend on:
- Whether the issue can be reproduced
- Its severity, scope and member impact
- Whether it involves configuration, custom code or the core platform
- Whether engineering changes are required
- Testing and quality-assurance needs
- Release scheduling and technical dependencies
- Whether additional information is needed from your team
Support can communicate what is known, request details, explain the next step and provide updates as the investigation progresses. Your Success Advisor can provide business context, help communicate impact and advocate internally - but does not control engineering estimates or release schedules.
It is also important to remember that a target response time is not the same as a guaranteed resolution time. Published Support plans provide target response times, while the time required to resolve an individual issue depends on what the investigation uncovers.
THE GOAL: An accurate, tested fix - not a fast promise that creates an awkward meeting with Future Us.
A Few Real-World Examples
The Situation | Start With | Why |
|---|
We want more members to return each month. | Success Advisor | Strategy |
Our email notifications stopped sending. | Support | Technical issue |
Should we introduce badges or points? | Success Advisor | Program design |
A badge isn't being awarded when its criteria are met. | Support | Unexpected behavior |
We're planning an SSO rollout later this year. | Success Advisor | Planning |
SSO returns an error during login. | Support | Troubleshooting |
Help us choose community health metrics. | Success Advisor | Measurement strategy |
The analytics dashboard is blank. | Support | Technical issue |
We're preparing for a business review. | Success Advisor | Business storytelling |
A page crashes whenever an administrator opens it. | Support | Technical issue |
Some initiatives need both teams. Your Success Advisor can help plan the destination; Support can investigate any technical potholes encountered along the way.
How to Open a Support Ticket
Before opening a ticket, check the Higher Logic Vanilla knowledge base and Support Community. If you still need assistance:
- Sign in to the Higher Logic Vanilla Success Community.
- Hover over Categories.
- Select Support Portal.
- Click Submit a request in the upper-right corner.
- Complete the request form and select the appropriate area of inquiry.
- Add attachments that will help Support investigate.
- Click Submit.
Complete instructions: Support - Submit a Request. Additional contact options and system status information are listed in the Higher Logic Vanilla Support overview.
Help Support Help You
A ticket that says only:
TICKET DESCRIPTION: It's broken. Please fix.
...is technically a ticket. It is also the beginning of a detective novel.
For faster investigation, include:
- A clear one- or two-sentence summary and the affected page URL
- What you expected to happen and what actually happened
- Steps to reproduce the issue
- The browser and device involved
- Any affected members, posts or email addresses
- Exact error messages or codes
- Full-window screenshots with the URL bar and, when useful, a short screen recording
- A HAR file for page loading issues
- When it started, whether it is intermittent and the business impact or urgency
A Better Ticket Subject
Instead Of | Try |
|---|
HELP!!! EMAIL IS BROKEN | Digest emails have not been delivered since August 1 |
Future You - and the Support agent investigating the issue - will be delighted.
What Your Success Advisor Cannot Do
- Diagnose or repair bugs, or replace the formal Support ticket process
- Make unapproved changes to your production community
- Promise a delivery date for a bug fix, engineering change or product update
- Resolve a technical issue without investigation details
What we can do is help frame the business need, recommend next steps, and connect the right resources.
The goal isn't to make you memorize an organizational chart. It's to get your question to the people best equipped to help - so you can spend less time wondering whom to contact and more time building a community your members want to return to.
