Contacting support and how tickets work

Support is a ticket system, not a chatbot queue. A person reads what you send and answers it. This article explains how to get a useful answer quickly, because the difference between a ticket resolved in one reply and one that takes five is almost entirely down to what is in the first message.

Opening a ticket

Signed in, go to Support in your dashboard and start a new ticket. This is the better route: the ticket is linked to your account automatically, so whoever picks it up can already see your contracts, payments and history without asking you to prove who you are.

Not signed in, use the contact form on the site. You will be asked to confirm your email address before the ticket reaches anyone, which stops the queue filling with unverified noise. Check your inbox after submitting, click the link, and the ticket becomes real. You get a tracking link so you can follow it without an account.

If you cannot sign in and that is the problem, the contact form is the right route. Use the address on the account.

What to include

Answer these four things in your first message and you will usually get a resolution rather than a question:

1. What you were trying to do. Not the error, the goal. "I was trying to withdraw my balance" tells someone far more than "it says invalid".
2. What happened instead, exactly. Quote the message on screen if there is one.
3. The reference. A contract, an order, an invoice number, an amount and a date. This is the single most useful thing you can provide, because it turns a search into a lookup.
4. What you already tried.

A screenshot is worth a paragraph. You can attach files to a ticket, and images are shown inline in the thread.

The unhelpful version of a first message is "payment problem, please help". It is not that nobody wants to help — it is that the reply can only be a request for the information above, which costs you a full round trip before anything happens.

Choosing a category

You pick a category when opening a ticket: billing, payments, account, technical, trust and safety, or other. It routes your ticket to the people who work on that area.

Do not agonise over it. If the category is wrong it gets moved, and nobody thinks less of you for it. Getting it roughly right is faster than getting it exactly right.

You do not set a priority. Urgency is assessed by the team from the content, so that a genuine emergency is not sitting behind five tickets that were all marked urgent by their authors. If something is genuinely time-critical, say so and say why in the message itself.

Replying by email

When support replies, you get an email. You can reply straight to that email and your reply lands on the ticket. You do not need to sign in, find the thread and type it again.

Two practical notes. Reply above the quoted text, which is what most email clients do by default; everything below is trimmed off so old messages do not pile up. And attachments sent by email arrive on the ticket like any other, so photographing a document and replying from your phone works fine.

The statuses

Open — with the support team.

Waiting on you — somebody has asked you something and the ticket is paused until you answer. This is the status people miss most often, and the ticket sits still until you reply. You will be nudged if it goes quiet, and eventually it closes itself.

Resolved — an answer has been given. Not gone: you can still reply, and a reply reopens it.

Closed — finished. A reply after this starts a new ticket that references the old one, so the history is not lost.

How long it stays reopenable

A resolved ticket stays reopenable for a window after it is resolved. Reply within that window and it picks up exactly where it left off, with all the context.

After the window, a reply opens a new ticket linked to the old one. Nothing is lost, it just starts a fresh thread rather than reviving a stale one.

Response times

There is a target for first response, and targets for resolution that vary with how serious the issue is. They are real and monitored rather than decorative.

What actually affects your wait:

• A complete first message. The biggest factor by far.
• Whether it depends on someone else. A card issuer dispute moves at the issuer's pace, which can be weeks. You will be told when that is the situation rather than left wondering.
• Duplicate tickets. Opening a second one about the same problem does not speed it up. It slows you down, because someone has to work out the two are the same person before either can be answered.

Things worth knowing

Nobody at Open Lance will ever ask for your password or a two-factor code. Not support, not in a ticket, not on a call. Any message asking for either is an attack, however convincing it looks. See Staying safe on Open Lance.

Support cannot decide a dispute. Contract disputes go through mediation, which is a separate process with its own evidence stage and reviewers. Support can explain it and check where yours is, but cannot rule on it. See Disputes and mediation.

Support cannot release escrow on request. Money moves through approvals or through mediation. This is not obstruction — it is the reason escrow is worth anything. If a person could release funds because someone asked persuasively, the guarantee would be worthless.

Appeals go through support. If your account is restricted, opening a ticket is exactly the right thing to do. See Account restrictions and appeals.

Before you open a ticket

Two things resolve a large share of what arrives:

Search the help centre. These articles are written from the questions support actually receives. When you start typing into the ticket form, matching articles are suggested automatically — worth a glance, because the answer is often there and instant.

Check the obvious status. If money has not arrived, check whether it is in your pending balance rather than available. If a withdrawal has not landed, check your payout method is verified. If you cannot post, check whether a restriction notice is on your dashboard. Each has an article here.

And if none of that helps: open the ticket. That is what it is for, and a real person will read it.

Attachments and screenshots

You can attach files to a ticket, and it usually saves a round trip.

Images preview inline in the thread, so a screenshot of an error is visible immediately rather than needing to be downloaded. Documents and PDFs open in a viewer. Anything else downloads.

A few things that make a screenshot genuinely useful rather than decorative: capture the whole window including the address bar, do not crop out the error text, and if a figure is wrong, capture the screen showing the figure rather than retyping it. If you are reporting something that only happens sometimes, a short screen recording is worth a great deal more than a description.

Do not send credentials, card numbers or your password in a ticket. Nobody needs them and a ticket is a record several systems have touched.

Following a ticket without an account

If you opened a ticket through the public contact form, you get a tracking link. It shows the thread and lets you reply without creating an account.

Keep the link. It is the only route back to that ticket, and it is tied to the email address you verified.

If you later create an account with the same address, mention the ticket reference and the history can be connected.

What support can and cannot do

Worth setting out plainly so nobody spends a round trip discovering it.

Can: explain anything about how the platform works, investigate a payment or a charge, chase a stuck process, correct a mistake made by the platform, lift a restriction on appeal, fix an account problem, and escalate something that needs a decision.

Cannot: release escrow because one party asked, decide a contract dispute, share another user's personal details, reverse an approval you made, or give tax or legal advice.

The two most common frustrations both come from that second list. Support cannot release escrow on request, because escrow that can be released by persuading someone is not escrow. And support cannot decide a dispute, because disputes have their own evidence process with reviewers precisely so the outcome does not depend on who wrote the more compelling ticket.

Getting the fastest answer

Include the reference. A contract, order, invoice or receipt number turns a search into a lookup.

One ticket per problem. Two problems in one thread means one of them gets forgotten.

Reply when asked. A ticket in "waiting on you" is not being worked on.

Say what changed. If something worked yesterday and not today, that is the most diagnostic sentence available.

Related

• Account restrictions and appeals
• Disputes and mediation
• Staying safe on Open Lance