A technical support case at Varjo rarely looks like a consumer one. The headset in question is usually installed in a certified simulator, on an air base or at a training center, with a syllabus running around it. There may be three organizations involved before you even reach us: a prime contractor, a system integrator, and the unit that actually trains on the thing. The device may not be allowed to leave the building it is in. The deadline is often a course starting on Monday.
My job is to make sure that complexity lands on us instead of on you. This post covers the part of that you can use: which team to contact for what, and what makes an urgent case move fast.
TWO TEAMS, TWO DIFFERENT JOBS
Customers often assume Varjo has one technical group. There are two, and knowing which one you need can save a lot of time.
Tech Support is the team I work on. It comes with every purchase, and it handles cases: something is behaving unexpectedly, a license needs sorting out, a new workstation is not cooperating, a question came up that nobody on your side can answer. We work by case and by device, which is why serial numbers matter so much to us. There is no such thing as a question too small to send us. If you bought through a reseller or integrator, your case may route through them, and that is normal rather than a delay.
Varjo Alpha is our professional services team of solutions engineers. They are not a help desk. They come in on a scope, work on your system, and often work on site. There are three levels of engagement:
- Standard Headset Solutions for teams who want a fast, low-integration start with the applications they already use, including a dedicated engineer who knows your setup.
- Tailored Deployments for mid-sized programs needing integration and customization, on-site installation and training, solution design from discovery through optimization, and work with the APIs and advanced mixed reality features. This is where most aerospace, defense, and maritime training projects land.
- Custom Projects for large-scale, mission-critical programs, where the team co-engineers something beyond the standard product and stays involved long term, including input into the roadmap.
The rule of thumb: if your question is about the system you already have, send it to tech support. If the work is about designing, integrating, or scaling a system, ask your Varjo contact about the Varjo Alpha team. Simulator manufacturer Entrol did the latter, and the case study from their Madrid workshop is a fair picture of what that engagement looks like.
What makes an urgent case move fast
Some of this is obvious once you see it written down, and almost nobody does all of it.
- Model, edition, and serial number. On the type label on the back support of the headband, or in Varjo Base under Settings > Support > About. XR-4, XR-4 Focal Edition, and XR-4 Secure Edition differ in ways that change the answer, so the edition is not a detail.
- A diagnostics report. In Varjo Base, go to Settings > Support > Troubleshooting > Diagnostics and select Open. It collects what we need into plain text files on your own machine, and nothing is sent until you send it. You can read exactly what you are sharing first, which is worth knowing on secure sites where people often assume diagnostics are off the table.
- Say the deadline out loud. "We have students on Monday" is helpful information. It changes how a case is prioritized and who picks it up.
- Add as many details as possible. Letting us know how long an issue has been going on for, and what steps you have already tried to rectify it, is great.
- Name a second contact. Training schedules do not pause when one person is traveling, and a case with one named human on it can sit for days for no good reason.
- Tell us your constraints early. Whether the device can leave the site, who is cleared to handle it, who can sign for a delivery, and any export considerations. These shape what is possible, and finding out late is what turns a two-day case into a two-week one.
Two bookmarks also save everyone time: the Help Center Downloads section, which holds user guides, compliance documents, and calibration sheets that procurement and accreditation teams ask for, and the Security FAQ, which is the page to forward to your own IT and security people.
Why a complex case does not stall
The reason support can absorb a case with three organizations and a Monday deadline is structural, and it is the part I spent much of this year rebuilding.
When I mapped how cases moved through Varjo, I did not find chaos. I found three teams, each doing their work well without a shared view of the others. Context was being reassembled at every handoff. So we rebuilt the flow in Jira around how those teams actually work, rather than around an ideal version of it, and we kept five distinct case scenarios separate instead of flattening them into one queue that would have been easier to explain and much harder to work in.
A case now has one record, one named owner at every stage, and visibility for every team that touches it. One colleague told me her team was finally in the loop and could comment on cases directly, which was the feedback I valued most.
None of that is visible from the outside. What it produces is: your case does not restart when it crosses a team boundary, and you get told where things stand instead of an estimate. That is what makes enterprise support workable at the scale and urgency our government and commercial customers operate at, and it is the kind of groundwork we will keep doing as the customer base grows.
If you have a question, the Help Center is the fastest way to reach my team. If you are planning a deployment, talk to your Varjo contact about Varjo Alpha before the room is built rather than after.
-Gabriela
Helpful links:
- Contact Varjo Support
- Varjo Alpha professional services
- How do I find the model and serial number of my headset?
- How to generate and send your headset diagnostics report
- Downloads: user guides, compliance, calibration sheets
