How can I escalate issues in Office 365?

Hi Deleted,

To your first question, no this isn't the preferred way to get support or get a ticket escalated :) We receive thousands of support tickets every day and we have thousands of folks in our support teams across the world who are working hard to resolve those tickets to get customers up-and-running as quickly as possible.

I participate in the community because I'm genuinely interested to hear feedback - good and bad - from customers who are engaging with our Office 365 support teams. My core role at Microsoft is to ensure our teams are ready to support customers. Of course, I don't do this alone - my immediate team and a host of folks in our global virtual teams work together to make this happen.

When I hear that the support experience hasn't met the high bar we set for ourselves, I want to know why. Was it because we didn't equip our teams with the right information? Did one of our processes break? Do we have an issue with our tools? Whatever the problem, I want to know because if there's an opportunity for my team to do something differently to avoid the problem in the future, we can address that.

Then, of course, there are issues that aren't within the immediate control of my team. In these cases, I send the feedback over to the folks who manage the support team. These folks will then take action so that the feedback gets to the right team or individual allowing us to learn and hopefully do better next time.

As I don't work 24x7 and have a day-job and family, I'm not always as present in the community as I'd like to be. Next week for example I'm on business travel to Redmond, Washington and will be leading a workshop all week! This leaves little time for community participation.

So, what is the right way to get help? For the majority of our customers, they get the help they need very quickly and have no cause to need to "escalate". However, when things don't go to plan, the first avenue should be to work with the support ambassador who's working on your support ticket. Ask them why it's taking longer than expected to resolve your issue. Ask them what their next steps are to assist you. Ask them to help you understand why they are asking you for certain information or why they are asking you to complete certain troubleshooting steps.

I'll often have customers say to me "I don't know why support asked me to do x, y, or z because I knew that it wouldn't make a difference". In reality, the steps that you are being asked to follow often help customers to resolve issues, or serve to collect valuable information that can be used to inform the next steps or escalation.

If you don't think you are getting the help you need, ask the support ambassador what's needed before they will escalate the ticket. Every person in the support organization wants to resolve your ticket as quickly as possible.

All that said, I did take a look at your support ticket and I've sent feedback over to the folks who manage this team. I don't see any notes in the ticket to explain why the support ambassador believes EX131895 is the cause here. I don't think you'll see this in your Service Health Dashboard because this outage doesn't currently appear to be impacting you. Maybe the issue has since been resolved, or maybe the SI was mis-keyed by the support ambassador. Whatever the case, only the support ambassador who supported you can answer this.

I hope we can get this sorted for you soon. Let me know how it goes.

-thanks, Russell.