This article will help you identify which procedure you should follow in case you are experiencing a significant issue with Spare Platform. View Spare's System Status and check if there are any reported outages by clicking on the image below.
Open the tabs to follow the escalation steps, depending on which side an issue occurred.
Administrator/Back-Office Escalation Procedure
➡️ If a back-office user encounters a problem that prevents them from carrying out their normal duties, the user should first:
Check that they are accessing platform.sparelabs.com from Google’s Chrome browser (other browsers are not supported).
Force refresh the page by holding down (on Windows) the CTRL key and clicking the Refresh button in the top left or by holding down CTRL+F5.
Try quitting Chrome completely and reopening it.
Try closing other open programs (this will free up computer memory).
If the above steps do not resolve the issue, try restarting your computer.
⚠️ If that does not resolve the issue, please contact a manager/administrator in your organization.
➡️ If a manager or administrator cannot find a solution, contact Spare.
For non-urgent issues, email [email protected] or contact Spare via the live chat feature that can be found in Spare Platform or at www.sparelabs.com.
Both [email protected] and Spare live chat are monitored between the following hours (excluding December 25, January 1):
Monday: 2am - 5pm (PST)
Tuesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Wednesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Thursday: 2am -12am (PST)
Friday: 8am - 12am (PST)
Saturday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Sunday: 10am-7pm (PST)
They have direct lines to Spare operations and engineering staff. You should receive a response within 30 minutes during the above hours (excluding December 25 and January 1).
For emergency system disruptions, where a system issue is preventing the reception or delivery of passenger trips for multiple drivers or passengers and the issue needs to be urgently resolved to provide immediate rider trips:
➡️ If during normal Spare office hours (listed above and excluding Canadian holidays), please reach out to [email protected] or contact Spare via Intercom chat.
➡️ If outside of normal office hours, call our urgent emergency response line: +1 604-800-6708
➡️ Please note that we may be receiving multiple simultaneous calls and may not be able to answer all at once.
If calling at early or late hours of the day or night, please be advised that you may be waking someone up and that they may need some time to make their way to their computer to begin working on the issue.
Before calling, please gather details on the issue, including context and/or pictures and videos, and be prepared to explain the issue and provide information to Spare.
Follow ups on issues resolution will be via: 1. Spare's Status Page; 2. Email; 3. Intercom Chat
Spare Internal Escalation Workflow
➡️ The user reaches out to Spare via live chat or email ([email protected]). They should outline the issue that they are experiencing and provide information such as links, screenshots, and other relevant information that can aid in diagnosis.
➡️ The Spare representative verifies the information presented to them, attempts to reproduce the issue, and then troubleshoots with the reporting user to try to resolve the issue.
➡️ If the issue being reported is something that is preventing the customer from booking new trips, editing or canceling existing trips, completing trips, creating or managing time-sensitive duties, or accessing the platform, then an outage can be triggered.
➡️ When an outage is triggered, an alert is sent to an on-call member of Spare’s engineering team. On average, on-call alerts are acknowledged within 5 minutes.
➡️ The engineer assigned to the outage will triage the issue and begin investigating.
➡️ An internal communications channel is automatically created to provide a central location for outage communications.
➡️ If the issue is triaged and determined to be a true outage, an email communication is sent to customer outage contacts and the Spare system status page (https://sparelabs.statuspage.io) is updated with details.
➡️ Once the issue has been resolved, a follow-up email will be sent to customer outage contacts and the system status page will be updated.
➡️ The next business day, a post-mortem will be carried out by our engineering team to identify the root cause of the issue and what preventative measures Spare will take to prevent similar issues from recurring.
Spare's Status Page
➡️ Spare’s status page is a reliable source for users to see the status and performance of our platforms (Admin Portal, Driver application, Rider application & API).
➡️ It includes live and historic data showing system uptime as well as any outage events, their descriptions, duration, as well as resolution and post-mortem details.
Driver Escalation Procedure
If a driver encounters a problem that prevents them from carrying out their normal duties (i.e., the driver is being prevented from accepting or delivering trips), the driver should attempt to resolve the problem themselves using all the training they have received, the instructional video, and a quick reference guide.
➡️ Here is what a driver can try to do on their own:
Check that the tablet is connected to cellular internet by looking in the top right of the screen to view the LTE label and signal strength.
Try quitting the app and reopening it.
Try restarting the tablet.
Check that the Spare Driver app is the up-to-date version by navigating to the updates section of the app store.
If you are running the latest version of the app or the issue still persists after an update, try uninstalling and reinstalling the application and sign in again.
⚠️ If that does not resolve the issue, please contact a manager/administrator in your organization.
Please include:
Normal-hours phone/contact: ______________
After-hours phone/contact: ________________
➡️ If a manager or administrator cannot find a solution, contact Spare.
For non-urgent issues, email [email protected] or contact Spare via the live chat feature that can be found in Spare Platform or at www.sparelabs.com.
Both [email protected] and Spare live chat are monitored between the following hours (excluding December 25, January 1):
Monday: 2am - 5pm (PST)
Tuesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Wednesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Thursday: 2am -12am (PST)
Friday: 8am - 12am (PST)
Saturday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Sunday: 10am-7pm (PST)
They have direct lines to Spare operations and engineering staff. You should receive a response within 30 minutes during the above hours (excluding December 25 and January 1).
For emergency system disruptions, where a system issue is preventing the reception or delivery of passenger trips for multiple drivers or passengers and the issue needs to be urgently resolved to provide immediate rider trips:
➡️ If during normal Spare office hours (Listed above and excluding Canadian holidays), please reach out to [email protected] or contact Spare via Intercom chat.
➡️ If outside of normal office hours, call our urgent emergency response line: +1 604-800-6708
➡️ Please note that we may be receiving multiple simultaneous calls and may not be able to answer all at once.
If calling at early or late hours of the day or night, please be advised that you may be waking someone up and that they may need some time to make their way to their computer to begin working on the issue.
Before calling, please gather details on the issue, including context and/or pictures and videos, and be prepared to explain the issue and provide information to Spare.
Follow-ups on issues resolution will be via: 1. Spare's Status Page; 2. Email; 3. Intercom Chat
➡️ If the problem is determined to be a hardware or network issue, Spare will work with your organization to try to find an interim fix - however, please note that Spare’s ability to resolve issues related to hardware and/or network issues is limited.
Passenger/End-User Escalation Procedure
➡️ If multiple rider/end-users encounter problems that prevent them from booking a trip or otherwise utilizing the service, the customer service agent or other person communicating with the rider/end-user should:
Ask the rider to quit and then reopen the app
Check to make sure that the rider is connected to the internet
Check that the rider is using the latest version of the rider app and, if not, ask them to update to the latest version.
If using the Spare Rider app, the version number can be found at the bottom of the account page that is accessed by clicking on the menu button in the top left of the app. The version number can then be compared to the latest version found in the App Store or Google Play Store.
If using a proprietary rider app, please check with your organization.
Ask the passenger to restart their phone and retry.
➡️ If that does not resolve the issue, please contact a manager/administrator in your organization.
Please include:
Normal-hours phone/contact: ______________
After-hours phone/contact: ________________
➡️ If a manager or administrator cannot find a solution, contact Spare.
For non-urgent issues, email [email protected] or contact Spare via the live chat feature that can be found in Spare Platform or at www.sparelabs.com.
Both [email protected] and Spare live chat are monitored between the following hours (excluding December 25, January 1):
Monday: 2am - 5pm (PST)
Tuesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Wednesday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Thursday: 2am -12am (PST)
Friday: 8am - 12am (PST)
Saturday: 2am - 12am (PST)
Sunday: 10am-7pm (PST)
They have direct lines to Spare operations and engineering staff. You should receive a response within 30 minutes during the above hours (excluding December 25 and January 1).
For emergency system disruptions, where a system issue is preventing the reception or delivery of passenger trips for multiple drivers or passengers and the issue needs to be urgently resolved to provide immediate rider trips:
➡️ If during normal Spare office hours (Listed above and excluding Canadian holidays), please reach out to [email protected] or contact Spare via Intercom chat.
➡️ If outside of normal office hours, call our urgent emergency response line: +1 604-800-6708
➡️ Please note that we may be receiving multiple simultaneous calls and may not be able to answer all at once.
If calling at early or late hours of the day or night, please be advised that you may be waking someone up and that they may need some time to make their way to their computer to begin working on the issue.
Before calling, please gather details on the issue, including context and/or pictures and videos, and be prepared to explain the issue and provide information to Spare.
Follow ups on issues resolution will be via: 1. Spare's Status Page; 2. Email; 3. Intercom Chat