How can I escalate issues in Office 365?

Hi Russel

Thanks for getting back to me. The case was finally solved so there is no need for any further assistance.

Br.
Maciej

Thanks for flagging this Tim Schoeller. Sorry to hear we haven't answered your question yet.

I've sent this over to the team who owns your ticket and I've asked them to find out what the delay is.

Let me know if things don't improve.

-thanks, Russell.

I am having a lot of grief with ticket Ticket #13109288  14 days and no activity.  I have requested updates and requested a supervisor and receive no help.  Promised call backs do not occur.  Anything you can do would be greatly appreciated.  Most of my tickets go smoothly but this support experience has been the exception.  

Hi Maciej Karpinski 

Apologies I missed your note about your support experience. If you want to PM me with details on what happened, I can feed this back to the support team who handled your case. If the case is still open, let me know and I can get somebody to take a look at this for you.

-thanks, Russell.

Hi Maciej Karpinski,

You are right that it's currently not possible to view the case history via the Office 365 admin center. I don't have a solution for you right now that would allow you to access this information unfortunately. The only way to know what's happening is to discuss with the Microsoft support ambassador who owns the support case.

The Microsoft team responsible for developing our modern support infrastructure is aware of this gap and does have an item in the backlog to address this. However there isn't currently a timeline for when this might be implemented.

-thanks, Russell.

This is so far my worst support experience ever :-(

I've been calling the O365 support during the whole weekend and every time they tell me that I will be contacted by a technician but nothing happens, our whole SharePoint environment is completely down from time to time and I have no feedback what so ever to the users :-(

If there is anyone here reading this that has any connections within Microsoft support and would be able to help me out it would be really appreciated.

Hi RussellRead 

Is there any way to get access to the case logs? I used to work quite a lot with Premier Support before and we could always login via the web portal and check whats going on with our cases but this time I'm working for a client that doesn't have Premier Support so we opened a case via the O365 portal ind it is basically impossible to get information about what's going on with the case. I've called the support 6 times during the last three days and asked to be contacted by the technicians to get some feedback, every time I called they promised me that I will be contacted but nothing happens. I would really be helpful if there was a way for us to see online what is going on with the case. (12832430)

Br.

Maciej

Hi Russell, 

Thanks for the follow up. I usually do not have problems solving issues that support is not able to, or waiting for a T2/T3 tech; this particular case I wanted an escalation because basically they broke what I had already working! 

Thanks anyway for taking care of this.

Alan

Alan Perez,

Thank you for taking the time to send us feedback. I'm sorry that our support fell short of your expectations. I know how frustrating it is when you call for support and ultimately end up resolving the problem yourself.

I have reviewed the case notes but I can't see the full detail of your discussions - I suspect because much of this was covered during your phone call with our team.

I've sent your e-mail over to the manager of the team who supported you and to our escalation process manager so that they can review your experience to identify what opportunities we have to avoid this from happening in the future.

I'm also following-up to educate myself on the case surveys so that I understand why a survey was not sent. I'll let you know what I find.

-thanks, Russell.

Thanks I see that now... dont know how I missed it,

sorry,. 

Hi Gerry,

Looking at the case, the support team sent you e-mail on 19th October and followed up again on 23rd October to check if you still needed help.

The subject line of the e-mail is the same as in the inbound e-mail you sent to the support team on 19th October.

I'll add a note so that the support team knows you haven't seen their messages.

-thanks, Russell.

Hi,

Can you check this issue (Ticket #11814001) I opened it on the 6 days ago and I have not yet even had the initial contact with a support rep. I'm not sure whats happening here but it seems nothing is. can you see what is happening? 

Hi Russell, 

To be honest I usually receive kind of good support from MS, sometimes it is better, sometimes it is not, depending on which tech or team I end up... but the last time I needed to contact you guys, I received such a piece of cr^@ support that I need to escalate the issue.
Ticket #11667546

I was having problems with one account not properly syncing between the DC and O365. All the rest were working fine, but I was completely unable to make that account sync. I contacted support, they called me around 15 minutes later, so far so good.
I explained the issue to the tech, worked a little bit with him and he requested me to stop the sync between the DC and O365, I was reluctant to do so, because in the past I had issues of duplication when reactivating it, but he assured me that nothing was going to happen.
I did as instructed, made the changes.
Reactivated the sync.

Nothing worked at all, duplicated issues, no sync, etc.
He told me to stop and reactivate the sync. It did not work, because there is a "cooldown" time in which MS does not allow you to. He told me that he had done it multiple times, even insisting that I made a mistake in PS accepting the request with a "y" instead of "Y" (yep, capitalization is everything).

Of course it did not work and we ended up looking around (both of us) solutions in google.

It took me around 1 hour to find a solution and 3 extra hours to apply it, as I had to manually modify every immutableID, convert it, etc of every single user.

I requested an escalation of the issue but none was provided.

In the end, it took me 5 hours to solve the issue (during a weekend).

To be honest, I felt like he broke everything and it was up to me to fix his mess.
First time it happens, but then not even a survey arrived. I lost money, time and I am pissed off. I just wanted to make sure this does not happen to anyone else (at least from this tech)

Hi David,

Thanks again for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback - especially the feedback you've provided throughout your interactions with our support teams and in the closing survey.

I read through all of your feedback on Friday and I'll follow-up with you in e-mail to get you connected with one of my colleagues who owns the escalation processes for the teams you worked with.

-thanks, Russell.

Russell,

We finally have gotten resolution to the issue that we had, however, it was not based on the recommendations EVEN BY the "escalated" methodology - who had me working on "client based" troubleshooting when the issue was not to be reasonably assumed to EXIST on the client end (as we were able to replicate the issue on multiple boxes).

So it goes without saying that perhaps there was a software update that got pushed that finally resolved the issue.  

All that said, the methodology employed to get expert support in the VERY PRODUCTS supported is not (in my experience) sufficient to some percentage of the tickets that come in - certainly there is stuff level 1 can handle.  There does not seem to be a sufficient, reasonable escalation methodology if the issues are over a level 1 tech's head.  

This is revisited when I have questions about said updates as it pertains to an RDS environment and the correct practices - the level 1 folks have rightly suggested that GPO or the ODT are the right METHODS to look at as it pertains to updates, but they have NO expertise as that applies to an RDS environment, which is the specific (and Microsoft supported) environment, and thus cannot answer questions relative to how those would work (as you know, updates on a RDS box are not the same as others as you have to change modes).  O365 licensing is profile based, while the Office 2016 code is machine based and thus generates questions on HOW does one update an RDS box without causing issues.  

I am not going through a similar run around with existing support to get a person with at least SOME direct knowledge of the tools to offer assistance.

What do you recommend?  And should folks need to chase you down in this manner to nudge support in the right direction or IS IT TIME for Microsoft (O365 in this case) to again re-visit the support model.  It saves NO one time, nor money (including Microsoft) to have tickets stay open for more than one or two bites at the apple.  It's unfortunately becoming commonplace for it to take repeated efforts only to be rebuffed in speaking with someone with even basic expertise in the issues that are coming up.

Thanks so much!