Forum Discussion
Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..
In my experience, it depends a lot on the engineer handling the ticket. Some support engineers are skilled and good. Some are new bees and if I get a feeling that they dont undersand the ticket, I have to push to escalate the ticket.
Lots of good feedback here, and I can definitely agree with some of the key points. In particular when the new support experience was introduced I expressed my concerns about the "30 mins callback" promise, as well as the negatives of turning this into a "call center" experience - having limited option to categorize the issue and relying on someone on the other end to follow up with some basic Q&A before support even acknowledges the issue.
With all the money Microsoft is making now from O365, I would definitely love to see a trend of bringing more support in-house, limiting the number of vendors, or at least sticking to vendors that offer qualified people, not just the lowest cost.
Unfortunately most of the people directly responsible for the support experience are not on these boards afaik, so tagging few others instead. Anne Michels RussellRead, can you please forward this to the appropriate teams/people?
- > In particular when the new support experience was introduced I expressed my concerns about the "30 mins callback" promise, as well as the negatives of turning this into a "call center" experience
When I jumped on the Office 365 train in 2015 I was blown away by the support in a very positive way. Just call the number, get someone competent on the phone and resolve the issue in 30 minutes. Escalating a ticket was extremely easy, when the 1st level support technician was in over his head. Needless to say, that this tremendously helped to convice upper management to hop on board.
A year or so later, a call to the support line only resulted in some person explaining me how to open a ticket through the admin portal (what a joke).
Today I don't even try to call support anymore and just open a ticket. But that system is so broken, you can't even add technical details because the textbox (it isnt even a text area) is so small and limited. I usually just write someting along "HALP. OneDrive Broken. Cannot add user." just because the system doesn't let me add any specifics.
Oh, and I usually get an answer within three to ten days.
Office 365 management effectively crash landed the super sonic airplane that was Office 365 technical support.- RussellRead
Microsoft
Hi DanielNiccoli,
Thanks for the feedback and good to hear that you had some great support experiences in the early days. Sorry to hear that your more recent experiences haven't lived up to that standard.
In short, we've made a lot of changes in the past two years and the guys who answered the phones were indeed advising that you open an online ticket due to some limitations we had as we rolled out new tools.
In the online support experience, there are now fewer boxes and no dropdowns to select from because we are switching to a smarter way of identifying and routing tickets to a person who can help you. Rather than asking customers to do the work to categorize their ticket, our systems now look at the descriptive text you've entered and use that to display content that can help you to resolve your issue. Additionally, your text helps our systems determine where to route your ticket to.
Opening a ticket online generally is the best way to initiate a support ticket and our teams are working hard to respond to those tickets quickly. There are times when we see a lot of tickets created at the same time and this causes delays as we work to connect with each customer, but we continue to look at ways to better predict (and staff for) the times that we'll see tickets arriving.
We have a program of continual improvements and I hope that you'll start to experience and see these improvements if you need to contact support in the future. We know that we've still got work to do, and we'll never stop looking for ways to improve.
-thanks, Russell.
Hello Vasil Michev,
Thanks for your answer. Indeed, the "30 mins callback" promise seems to be the main issue here.
On the other hand, translating the current situation of 2-day up to 2-week callback into a new "promise" is hardly what Microsoft wants. Imagine "we will call you back in 2 weeks"...
I think there is more behind this than the promise. There should be a sound balance between the capabilities of a support system and the advertisement given for it. Otherwise it will produce a lot of negative feedback and/or customer dissatisfaction. Looking at the profile of Anne Michels, it looks like it touches on what she is doing.
Office 365 is currently, as experienced from the customer side (albeit we are a partner with not just a few tenants), unbalanced in that sense. There is a bad response time at the start, but also too much time elapsing between contacts when the problem is not solved at the first attempt.
That I as a customer cannot comment or feedback on this in the questionnaire is a clever oversight of the question list. Intended or not.
My wish, of course, would be that Microsoft is rebuilding the capabilities to fulfill the 30 minutes promise again.
Office 365 support used to be good. Very good in fact. Can we go back to that?
Daniel
Unfortunately Anne moved to a different team now (or should I say Team), but she might still be able to direct this to the correct people.
