This is Three Rings CIC’s Policy of Mutual Respect. It sets out how our volunteers will interact with users of the system when they contact us for help, and the commitment made by our team to deliver high quality support for the system. It also sets out the steps we will take to defend our volunteers against inappropriate or abusive behaviour
We are volunteers too
Everyone who volunteers for Three Rings gives their time for free in order to make it easier for people around the world to volunteer.
As a nonprofit organisation we do our best to deliver professional, enterprise-level software at the lowest price possible. To reduce the workload of our Support volunteers, we ask that – where possible – any Three Rings user who is part of an organisation subscribing to Three Rings should first contact their organisation’s nominated Support People.
However, any user is welcome to contact us directly if they find that easier, and we make no distinction between users who contacts us first and those who initially contact their local Support Person when providing technical support: in either case we will do our best to help.
The Support Team’s commitment to you
Anyone who contacts Three Rings Support directly will be helped to the best of our ability.
Wherever possible we will answer any support requests sent to support@threerings.org.uk within 24 hours of their being sent.
For more complicated enquiries, or those which require investigation on our part, we’ll keep you updated on progress, and provide estimates of how long we think it might take to help solve your query.
To solve some enquiries, a member of the Support team may need to take a closer look at your account – we will never do this without first asking your permission, and no member of the Support team will ever ask for your password.
Any user who contacts the support team will be treated with respect and courtesy in all our dealings with them.
What we ask in return
In return, our volunteers should also be treated with respect. In certain cases, if a user is acting disrespectfully towards one or more members of the Three Rings team, Three Rings CIC reserves the right to take action to protect our volunteers.
Disrespectful behaviour includes, but is not limited to, using language of an offensive or obscene nature, and transmitting threats of violence or messages deliberately designed to harass our volunteers.
In order to protect our volunteers we may…
Users who demonstrate unacceptable behaviour/usage of the service, in violation of our Policy of Mutual Respect, may receive a warning asking them to change their language or behaviour.
If the offending behaviour continues, or is sufficiently severe, Three Rings CIC may protect its volunteers from abuse by ending any contact without a prior warning. Users who experience this will be invited to re-establish contact in a fresh enquiry providing that they review and agree to follow the Policy of Mutual Respect in future communications. Where we feel the level of abuse justifies such a step, we may further request that the fresh enquiry does not take place before a given date in order to allow a ‘cooling off’ period.
In extreme cases, Three Rings CIC reserves the right to block contact with abusive users entirely. In this case, we will blacklist the users in question and they will be forbidden from interacting with our volunteers again. Should we be forced to resort to this measure we shall, where possible, notify the organisation(s) to which the abusive user belongs and make it clear to that organisation’s Support People or Administrators that the user in question will only be able to access technical support via their organisation’s nominated Support People in the future.