How can I escalate issues in Office 365?

Hi Ron_Rufo,

From reading the case notes, it looks like the case was escalated yesterday. I see a note from the first phone call you had with our team saying that you wanted to escalate.

It looks like the escalation engineer you are speaking with attempted to contact you yesterday and again today.

Now that you've responded with the information they requested, I'm sure that troubleshooting can continue and, if needed, the support team will escalate if it's believed to be a bug or problem that requires our engineering team to get involved.

Just to be clear, no part of my official job is related to looking at or dealing with escalations and nor do I have a special way to get cases escalated. But it's a great time to remind people who I am and why I try to engage in some of these community discussions.

The following text is an edited/updated version of a post I previously posted in this thread and is a good place to start if you found this page because you need help with an active support case.

If you found this thread and are thinking "Oh great, if I contact Russell he'll be able to get my case escalated for me", sadly 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. Sometimes, it takes longer to resolve some cases than others. At times, it takes our teams longer to respond to customers if we see increased volume of cases.

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. My work is primarily focussed on partnering with our engineering and marketing teams to stay close to new feature development to ensure we've got a plan to get our teams ready to support those new features when they are deployed. 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. When I'm deeply involved in projects or development work, or out on vacation, it might be a while before I see a message. Therefore, if you need "immediate" assistance, contacting me isn't the best plan.

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 team 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" or "I know that this problem is a bug in the product". 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. If you don't get what you need or things don't improve, you should see the e-mail address for the tech lead and/or manager for the support team listed in the e-mail signature of the person who e-mailed you. You can contact the tech lead/manager to tell them that you aren't getting what you need.

That said, I'm always happy to hear from anybody who's engaged with our support teams and am happy to chat privately or in this forum to respond to feedback.

-thanks, Russell.