International Cases Best Practices

1. Always check the Export status of anyone asking questions before doing anything!

1. Export check status = Pass?  
2. User-approved campaign = approved?

2. Due to export regulations, Support cannot work on international users' scenarios with their data, create custom code for them, or provide guidance that is specific to their use cases. Providing these resources could be considered an export of engineering services. We can point to examples in the Help, tutorials, blogs, whitepapers, YouTube videos, and existing publicly available code samples that would address their needs. We can also provide guidance on how STK operates and functions. We cannot build things specifically for an international partner or customer unless we provide it to the world in the form of an FAQ article, blog, or code sample.

3. Always copy the appropriate international AGI team on all cases for their region, using the region email alias. 
 

See the list of country-specific email aliases, linked at the bottom of this article, and please note that sometimes there are two or more partners in a single region. This has caused discord between channel partners in country in some cases, so please reference the following email alias spreadsheet that details who gets leads, tech questions, etc. and who does not. Also, the country email aliases no longer exist (for example, india@agi.com). In this case, you would now copy asia-support@agi.com and either Samkalpa-IN@agi.com or CADFEM-IN@agi.com, depending on the account. You can check the user's account in Salesforce and identify the correct channel partner under "Sales Region." If the case is a sales lead, namely requesting a quote or an evaluation license extension, copy the sales lead only (for example, asia@agi.com). This will ensure international engineers and partners are in the loop. 

4. How should we respond to students asking support questions (International)?

All questions from international students should be redirected to Asia@agi.com for APAC and Europe@agi.com for Europe and International Americas. The recipients will address customers for that region. In-country staff will engage with the student based on the protocol for that country. The only exception is AGI.com login questions, which we can address with the Salesforce team.

Academic support update:

• License extensions/product evaluations ultimately go to the regional sales teams. They will review which university it is associated with and then get it to the right partner and/or account manager. These are the academic leaders of each region:
  • EMEA: Mauricio Dwek
  • North America: Ryan Gordon
  • Asia: Aroop Tyagi

5. If a partner asks a question on behalf of a specific customer, link the case to that account and contact person. If the contact is not included, but only the account is, then keep the partner as the case contact and change the case account to be linked to the customer account.

6. When closing the case, mark it as "no follow-up" only if you changed the owner to the customer instead of the partner. When we work directly with the partners and attach the case to the end user, the end user might get confused as to why AGI is sending a survey request when it was the partner who replied to the inquiry. 

7. Never generate an STK X permanent license for free. You can and should include STK X licenses with every evaluation license; however, you should only include it as a permanent license with paid products.

8. Always check with the international team before issuing an evaluation license to a customer or partner. 


POCs: Peter Aves (business/commercial) and Karynna Tuan (technical/ACE)

For country-specific email aliases and channel partner email addresses, check the following Excel sheet that Peter keeps updated: 

International Email Aliases - Channel Partner and Ansys/AGI (Tech support should use the "Leads-Certs-Evals" tab)