Forum Discussion
Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..
MicrosoftThanks DanielHuberICX for starting the thread and thanks VasilMichev for adding me.
There are several issues discussed here that I see including initial response time, total time to solution, and quality of the support team/overall experience.
First, we should start by saying that delivering a quick initial response, resolving problems quickly, and leaving customers feeling good about the experience they received is paramount to what we're trying to achieve.
As you've noticed, we've invested in a modern support experience - and this means changes to both the customer-facing experience and the ticket management system, and we're making improvements to how our teams are structured to enable us to better deliver against the promise of faster response and solution times.
While it's no excuse for delivering anything other than exceptional support, change brings its own challenges. Sometimes, this results in longer wait times or longer times to solution - and we do know that there are times when we don't get things right and need to evaluate the changes we made and consider how to improve as we move forward.
We aren't done with our changes yet, so there's still more good stuff to come. I'd hope that some of this change will manifest itself into benefit that is visible to you in both the speed and the quality of service you receive.
All that said, the reason why your particular support experience(s) might not have been exceptional may not necessarily be the same as somebody else's. I'd be more than happy to pass feedback on, but it's generally best to pass this on with a ticket number (or numbers) so that we can better understand if there's a particular team, or technology, or support offering that isn't quite hitting the mark. You can provide ticket numbers here or send me a PM with them if you'd like to share the examples.
I realise that this post isn't going to magically change you experiences, but I hope it gives you confidence that we are listening and are constantly working to drive improvements across our tools, process, and people to make the support experience the very best it can be.
-thanks, Russell.
Ticket: case ID #7657635
Setup a ticket on the portal. There wasn't a drop down to pick from so I just submitted the ticket. I pasted a community article in my original request where I had already done a write up and gave examples down to even page load errors etc. of what was going on in this article. Here is that article if you wanted to see it: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/User-hover-cards-causing-Team-Group-Guest-users-SharePoint/m-p/170799#M15261
Don't remember the turn around time on it been too long, but I got called discussed the issue, which they obviously didn't even read the issue I posted into the ticket. Had to repeat all the exact steps and tell them everything all over again. And then they will look into it, call disconnected.
Called back shortly after. New person, explain the issue, do a remote session show the issue for screenshots etc. etc.
Called again no even 30 minutes later, another person, asking the same stuff.... at this point I've gotten frustrated. They ask for screen-share, screenshots etc. And now even fiddler logs. Mind you, this issue is easy to reproduce.
I get an e-mail some days later, maybe a week or so, saying they were able to reproduce my issue..... Great, maybe they will get it to the people that can fix it.
a week or so go by, i follow up. Then I get another e-mail, asking for more fiddler logs...... at this point I've had it. This is an issue that me and I've had at least 10+ other tenants verify having the same issues and I told them no. And I tell them I want my ticket sent to the SharePoint team. No idea why my ticket was in the Teams team, but it was and stayed there. The issue initiates from Teams but was obviously something on the SharePoint pages, but they should have picked up on this for routing.
Anyway, SharePoint support calls and wants me to go over the issue again. I almost lost my cool but I started to explain it to her and luckily she actually after I express my frustration said it's a known issue and they are working on it. That's all I wanted.... was this in a dev's hands to get fixed at this point.
It's been almost two weeks or so now since that e-mail the issue still exists. It's been broken well over a month. And it's now starting to affect my users who are inviting guests to SharePoint/Teams.
Anyway, as you can see this is a pretty long drawn out experience that shouldn't have taken such an act of congress to be escalated up to some folks that can understand the issue when a lot of that ground work was done ahead of time for them.
Anyway, sorry for the long e-mail. If you want to pull it to DM that's fine but figured I would air it out here.
Always with the fiddler traces. There needs to be a better way to get that information. We have to disable firewall rules in order to capture that traffic, which of course is frowned upon and requires a formal change request. I have never once had first level engineer identify anything from a fiddler trace that actually identified a problem. I think its a "buying time" ploy in most cases.
- RussellRead
J 1901 and Luke Hoffman
Thanks for taking the time to send feedback. I'm currently out for the holidays for a few weeks; however, I saw your posts so wanted to at least get an initial response out to you.
Contacting support should be a worry-free experience that gets you a solution to your problem quickly. We know that sometimes this isn't possible - but it absolutely is how we design the system to work. If we're not delivering, you are right to call us out on it.
I had to contact the tech support department of a tech company yesterday for an issue I was having with some home automation hardware. The experience was terrible! I spent over an hour on the phone and was forced to repeat the same steps, in the same order, more than 10 times! While I was performing these futile steps, a few things went through my mind.
First - I'm absolutely confident that the experience I received was not the experience that the company wanted me to have. If they ever listen back to the call, I'm sure it will be used as an example of how NOT to deliver support and how to drive your customer insane.
Second - the net of my support experience is that I most likely have defective hardware, so no amount of hand-holding was going to solve my problem.
Third - the person who was helping me was either new, inexperienced, or poorly equipped to do their job. Lack of training or poor quality training or lack of access to more experienced resources.
As I think of the problems I was hitting in my own support experience, I think about how we equip our support teams to help our customers. It's absolutely possible that we face some of the same challenges I call out above - but it's certainly not how we design the system to work and we invest constantly to bring improvements to both the technology that powers the support experience and the people who deliver the service.
I can't explain why your support experiences in the past months haven't met the high bar we set, but I can tell you that we certainly didn't do anything detrimental to result in such a change. If anything, we're doing quite the opposite. Our teams are moving away from scripted interactions, we are adopting a growth mindset in our approach and using our "failures" as opportunities to learn, and we continue to build our tooling based on the feedback from both customers and our support teams.
Regarding fiddler traces - or the ask to collect any other logs, screenshots, error messages etc. - none of these are tactics to "buy time". If the frontline teams don't have the expertise or tools to analyse the information, they will be sending it to (or might have already been asked to request it by) our more experienced folks. In many of our teams now, we have a mix of "frontline" and "escalation" resources so that the experience is part of a single team which enables individuals to develop and solutions to be delivered faster.
All that said, if you aren't having a good support experience, let the person who's helping you know. In many cases, you should see their manager's contact details in e-mail communications that are sent to you. You can provide feedback to the manager directly (if available) or provide the feedback directly to the support person you are working with.
If you still don't see an improvement, I'd love to hear from you to find out why things aren't going well.
A few notes on this to set expectations for anybody else who happens to be reading:
1. I don't work 24x7 and I'm not "the escalation guy" :) If I'm slow to respond it because I'm taking care of my day job (or on vacation!)
2. Sending a case number to me doesn't magically = faster solution. I'm interested in specific cases because it helps me to see what opportunities we should be following-up on to improve our service. I always provide cases to the managers/leaders of the team so that they can take action where required.
3. It's always best to have a conversation with the support person who's helping you. Whether it feels like it or not, they are human and they are doing their best to help. If they understand your concern or complaint, they might be able to do something immediately to resolve it.
Thanks again for sending the feedback. If you have specific examples you'd like me to take a look at, you can PM me and I'll look at them when I'm back after the holidays.
If you are lucky enough to be taking time off over the next few weeks, I hope you enjoy a relaxing break.
-Russell.
I would like to thank you publicly for all your efforts to try and investigate the issues I have raised with you. I know that you have tried your best and for that I am very appreciative.
But the sad reality is it is not getting any better, my working life is being ruined by having to raise cases with the office 365 support team. Out of 10 issues raised this year only 2 have been dealt with correctly and in a timely fashion.
I dread having to contact the support team as most the time it a frustrating loop of "have you tried this, have you tried that, can you send me a screenshot of the error message that you already have pasted in the ticket when you raised it." and asking all the questions you would ask of a novice user and they cut and paste standard questions that are not related to the issue that you are encountering.
I search all the forums, documentation and status pages for a solution, before I raise a case, so to be asked these questions is tedious.
They email you when you have explicitly asked them to call you on the phone.
They call and email outside your normal working hours even when you have repeatedly told them what those are.
If the person assigned goes off sick, no-one else bothers to pick up the call in their absence - great for time urgent critical issues - NOT.
They have no power to escalate any issues to get anything fixed, be it simple documentation correction or getting an identified issue fixed by a developer.
Cases drag on for months and then just get shut by them when they get bored without resolution or telling the customer.
I wish I did not have to write this, I have tried so hard to get the message across, but it is just not working, You have too many feedback mechanisms and none of them result in anything getting fixed, in product feedback, uservoice, office insider forum, github documentation comments and different office 365 support teams. I have been let down by every single one of these methods in the past 12 months and have the apology emails to prove it.
But ultimately this is causing me to let my customers down, because I cannot get their issues fixed in a timely manner and both I and them are losing faith in Microsoft Office as a credible solution.
I will give an example of the latest debacle:- some elements are abbreviated for the sake of time
one of my customer found suddenly that 80% of their incoming and outgoing genuine emails were being tagged as junk. We tried using the inbuilt "report this as not spam" tool, nothing changed and they started to lose business because the order confirmations were hitting their customers junk folders. This was affecting ALL of their users in the company.
Before raising a case I did full troubleshooting myself, I checked that their anti spam settings were on the standard defaults, I used the Microsoft test console to check the message-id's of the submitted samples - which said that NO RULES had been hit, - yet it was still tagged as spam by Microsoft's filters. I even worked out by painstakingly modifying the contents of an affected email and repeatedly sending it in to the customer until it no longer went to their junk, was that it was related to all emails that contained their own domain in the message body!!! e.g. when you reply to someone it usually contains text that shows the original senders email like "fred@xyzcorp.com wrote: "
So having narrowed it right down, I opened a ticket and asked to be contacted by phone - first agent decides to send me an email instead and ask dumb questions that were already answered in the case when I logged it. A terrible start to the call, After a frustrated email reply from me asking them to actually call me like I had asked for in the first place, someone else did pick up the case and called me.
I was asked for more screenshots, message id's headers etc, wasting 2 days and then that agent wrote to me by email and those responses got overlooked by me because they went to my junk mail (and I work in a different tenant but probably caused because they contained the text of the affected domain in them). Why didn't she call me instead if she was not getting a reply from me ? The lady kept asking me for all sort of other information - when all you needed was the message ID's and to escalate the issue! The lady kept apologising and saying that there was nothing she could do to get the issue looked at any quicker. I then heard nothing for 2 days and eventually someone else took over the call meanwhile we are on day 5 of a critical issue and no further forward.
Then 2 days on from that, after he said he had no further update and had not heard anything back from the relevant team, I noticed it had magically started working again. It turns out that the team responsible for the spam system had made a change and not bothered to tell him or me! I then asked him to try and find out a root cause analysis and was told that you do not do that sort of thing, I pressed him again and asked him to go back to that team and at least ask them when and what they had changed this took a further 4 days and all I got back was a vague "they whitelisted the customers domain the previous night" but had not informed the agent on the case.
- How is it that a customers own domain can suddenly get tagged as spam - without this being shown in any of your test tools? (by the way before you ask, they do not send bulk marketing emails out).
- Why did several dozen emails being reported using the "this is not junk" tool not result in this problem being picked up automatically? surely that is the point of that feedback tool?
- Why did a simple yet critical issue take so many days to get escalated to the relevant team? and then 2 days after that to be actioned ?
- Why did I have to jump through so many unnecessary hoops? when all you needed to do was supply the affected message ID's and the extra info that I had already worked out to the team that manage the rules engine?
- why did the rules team not communicate the fix they had applied back to the support agent ?
- why do you not do a root cause analysis to prevent this happening to another customer?
- Why did the first agent that took my case, decide to ignore the specified contact method of phone for an urgent case and send an email with canned cut and paste dumb questions already answered by reading the information supplied in the case?
Well there you go, rant over, but this is just one of the many calls that have been handled poorly this year.
