Support and response times

The working-day figures above are the longest we would expect to take, not what we are aiming for. Most issues finish well inside them, and a high priority fault is very often sorted the same day.

Fixed means the problem has stopped getting in your way. That can be a change to the code, a reliable way to carry on while we do the proper fix (we will say plainly when it is a workaround), or an answer, when the app was working as intended and what was needed was an explanation or a setting changed.

Support is for the people who run the app at your Maktab: the account owner, and the admin staff who work in it every day.

Teachers and parents should go to their Maktab, not to us. We cannot answer questions about a child's fees, classes, register or records, and it would be wrong if we could, because those records are yours and not ours. If a parent writes to us we will point them back to you, politely.

This is not us being unavailable. It is the only arrangement that works: one of our Maktabs has 589 children on its roll, and a support line open to every family at every Maktab would be answering nobody properly within a fortnight.

If you are the account owner, open Get in touch in your portal and choose Get help. It asks who it is affecting and how much it is getting in the way, takes your description, and gives you a reference. The time is recorded by the system, you can see where it has got to, and our replies appear there.

If you are one of the admin staff, ask your owner to raise it, so everything about your Maktab stays in one place.

If you cannot get into the app at all, email us at contact@themaktabapp.com and say what you were trying to do and what happened instead.

WhatsApp is for carrying on a conversation, not for starting one. Once you have raised something, the ticket itself has a button that opens WhatsApp with your reference and title already written in, so we know straight away which one you mean. Please do not send us a new issue on WhatsApp: raise it in the app first, so nothing is lost and the time is recorded. When you raise something you can also leave us your own WhatsApp number if you would like us to reply there as well. That is optional, we only use it for that one ticket, and if you leave it empty we simply reply on the ticket and by email.

Get in touch also has a place to send us an idea or a comment. We read every one. We do not promise a reply to those, and they are not faults, so they do not get the times on this page.

We aim to reply to everything within one working day, whatever the priority, and most messages are answered the same day. That is the same commitment our terms of service make, and it is the one on this page we hold ourselves to properly.

A reply means a real person has read it, decided how urgent it is, and told you what happens next. It does not always mean it is fixed yet. The reply time is the same for everything because nobody knows how serious an issue is until somebody has read it.

That is our ordinary service, and it is the one most Maktabs are on most of the time. When you first join us you get something different, and it is described below.

Starting a new system in a working Maktab is the hard part. Not the software, the switch: a roll of students in a spreadsheet somebody else built, classes that never quite matched the timetable, and a room full of teachers who need it to work on Saturday morning whatever happens.

So your first weeks with us run differently. We call it Hypercare, and it is not a faster version of the queue. It is us working alongside you.

We help you set your Maktab up. You are not handed an empty screen and a manual. We are on hand while you load your students, your guardians and your staff from whatever you have, a spreadsheet, an old system, or a stack of paper, and while you build your classes, your programmes and your timetable. If your data is messy, that is normal, and we will help you sort it out.

You get a phone number, and a person on the end of it. Ordinary support is by message, and there is a good reason for that: it is written down, it is searchable, and nothing gets lost. In Hypercare that flips. You can pick up the phone and talk to us, and most of Hypercare is spoken rather than typed, because the questions in week one are the sort you ask out loud. It is our business line, not anybody's personal number, and we give it to you when we start.

And we reply the same working day, rather than within one, for anything you do put in writing.

How long it lasts. The first 30 days after your Maktab goes live, and 14 days after a release that changes how you work. We tell you when it starts and when it ends, so nobody is left guessing whether they are still in it. If your first term is genuinely rocky, say so and we will extend it. We would rather do that than have you limp through.

What we need from you. Someone at your end who can answer questions about how the Maktab actually runs, and your data in whatever state it is in. We cannot invent your timetable, and we would not want to.

(It is called Hypercare because that was the least embarrassing name available. What it means is that for the first month you can phone us, and you are not doing this on your own.)

We set the priority, not you. That is not us overruling you. It is that we can see whether a fault is hitting one Maktab or all of them, and from where you are sitting you cannot.

When you raise an issue in the app we ask who it is affecting and how much it is getting in the way. We read it and set the priority, usually within one working day. Until then the ticket says the priority is not set yet. Once we have set it you see it on the ticket, with the reason if it is not what your answers pointed to. The clock on our targets starts when you send it, not when we set the priority.

For anything critical or high we tell you what we have set and why. If you think we have called it wrong, say so and we will look again and give you an answer either way. We move things up when a problem turns out to be bigger than it first looked, and down when it turns out to be smaller.

(Every issue is urgent to the person who raised it. We do know. We still have to put them in some sort of order.)

A working day means Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm UK time, not counting public holidays in England and Wales. That is what "working day" means everywhere on this page and in our terms. The clock starts when your message reaches us.

Every time on this page is counted in working days, critical issues included. Maktabs teach in the evenings and at weekends, and we know that is when a fault hurts most. When something critical comes in outside working hours we will often pick it up anyway, but that is at our discretion and it is not something we promise.

If your Maktab is outside the UK, the clock is still ours. Your Monday morning in New South Wales is our Sunday night, and a message sent then reaches us on our Monday. We would rather you knew that when you signed than found it out in the middle of term.

In Ramadan our hours shift later, and we will tell you the new ones before it starts. We close for both Eids. Your timetable changes then too, so if you need help rearranging classes, ask us in the fortnight before rather than the night before.

We are a small team. When the person who answers support is away, ill or travelling, critical issues still come first and everything else may take a day longer than usual. We will tell you when that is the case rather than leave you waiting and wondering.

Some things do not go in a queue at all.

If anything at all looks like information reaching someone who should not see it, we look at it before anything else. If the quickest way to stop it is to switch a feature off, or take the app down, we will do that first and explain afterwards.

You do not have to be sure before you tell us, and you should not wait until you are. Working out whether something is a breach is our job. We would far rather look at ten false alarms than hear about the real one a week late.

If it turns out personal information has been exposed, lost or changed without permission, our Data Processing Agreement takes over from this page. We will tell you within 24 hours of confirming it, because you are the data controller and you are the one who has to decide whether to tell the Information Commissioner and the families involved. Nothing on this page shortens that, lengthens it, qualifies it or replaces it.

This is not a safeguarding route. If you have a concern about a child, follow your own safeguarding procedure and speak to your designated lead. What we will do is treat any fault that stops you recording or reaching safeguarding information as critical.

These targets are for problems with our app. They do not apply to:

Your own broadband, wifi, devices, printers or Maktab network.

Putting back information that was entered wrongly or deleted at your end. We back up the whole platform so that we can recover it if something fails on our side, but we do not use those backups to put back one Maktab's records. An owner can export everything your Maktab holds at any time from the admin portal, and that export is your own copy: make it part of your Maktab's backup and continuity plan. If you would like guidance on writing one, ask us.

Settings changed at your end that have had an effect you did not expect.

An outage at a company we build on, which is the next section.

New features, changes to how something works, and new reports. We want to hear every one of them, and a good number of things in the app are there because somebody asked. But a request is not a fault, so it does not get a fix time. We will tell you whether it is something we plan to build.

We build on other companies, because that is how modern software works and because they run that infrastructure better than we could. Payments go through Stripe, the app is served by Cloudflare, your records live in a Neon database, email is sent by Resend, and signing in with Google uses Google. The full list is on our sub-processors page.

If one of them has an outage we cannot fix their systems. What we can do, and will:

Work out quickly whether the problem is ours or theirs, and tell you which. Tell you plainly what is affected and what still works. Chase them, and keep chasing them. Keep you posted as we learn things, rather than going quiet. Tell you when it is back, and what it means for anything that failed while it was down.

We will not send you to Stripe. You bought The Maktab App and we stay the people you talk to. To be straight with you, their service agreements are with us and not with you, so there is nothing there for you to claim against. What you have is us, staying on it and staying in touch.

This changes how long a fix takes. It does not change who answers to you. Our Data Processing Agreement says we remain fully responsible for what our sub-processors do with your data, and nothing on this page changes that. And if their systems have exposed your Maktab's information, we tell you within 24 hours of confirming it, whether or not they have finished their own investigation and whether or not they have given us the full picture.

We do our updates outside teaching hours wherever we can, and we tell you in advance when a change will be noticeable. Planned work we have told you about beforehand is not an outage.

We avoid shipping anything risky in the first week of your term or in the middle of enrolment, which is when you can least afford a surprise.

We aim to keep the platform available at all times and we monitor it continuously. We do not publish a contractual uptime figure and we do not offer service credits, and we would rather say so than quote a number with no remedy attached to it.

Here is the honest arithmetic. A service credit from a company our size would come to a few pounds, and a few pounds does not begin to make up for a Saturday morning without your registers. It would be a gesture, and you deserve better than a gesture.

What we offer instead is plainer. We tell you what went wrong, in writing, without being chased. And you are never locked in: you pay monthly or yearly by card, there is a 30 day money back guarantee on a new subscription, and you can export everything and leave whenever you choose. A company that has to earn your custom again every month has a real reason to answer the message.

Tell us. We would much rather hear it from you than have you quietly decide we are not very good.

There is no second line to escalate to here, because there is no first line. You are already talking to the people who write the code. What escalation means with us is this: we put in writing what happened, why it took as long as it did, when it will be sorted, and what we are changing so it is less likely next time.

If you would rather make it formal, our complaints procedure explains how, and we will not think any less of you for using it.

Every version of this page is numbered and dated. As we grow we expect to improve these times, in-sha-Allah. If we ever have to reduce anything here, we will tell every Maktab before it changes.

Questions about any of it: send us a message.