Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..

John Twohig

Thanks for the feedback; it's good to hear from somebody who's had a good experience. I think it's good to remember that we (the Office 365 support teams) manage thousands of interactions with customers each month and the significant majority of those interactions are fast, go smoothly, and our customers tell us that we did a great job.

However, this shouldn't detract from the fact that we've still got work to do to improve - and the feedback received here helps to keep us grounded.

You are correct that support experience can vary depending on the individual you work with in support - however, we don't want that to be the case. We will always have people with varying levels of expertise and experience as we on-board new folks to our support teams and as the tenure of others matures. Regardless of this, we expect our teams to work together to collectively deliver great experiences and much of our focus now (in addition to the work we're doing on the ticket management tools) is on how we structure our teams to better deliver solutions to customers faster than ever before.

I can't respond directly to the comment you heard from one of our partners because I don't have the context of the discussion. It is correct to say that Microsoft uses a mix of in-house employees and supplier companies to deliver support and I'm sure that we'll continue to investigate ways in which we can deliver even better experiences in the future as new opportunities present themselves.

One of our primary goals is to reduce the volume of support tickets we see by making the service more robust, looking at ways that we can self-heal or proactively flag potential issues so that they don't turn into support tickets, and making it easier for our Office 365 administrators to resolve and fix issues themselves through better diagnostics and self-help capabilities.

If we can't prevent a problem or if we don't provide the tools/information that allows you to resolve a problem yourself, we'll continue to have our support teams here who are ready to assist you to get your service back up-and-running again as quickly as possible. It's absolutely in our interest to fix your issue and to make your support experience great - we want you to love using the service, but most importantly, we want everything to be super-easy so that you think less about how to manage the service and/or how to fix problems, and more about how your employees can be more productive by using the full range of features provided.

If the general question is "Is Office 365 support going away", my answer is no! We have, and we'll continue to have thousands of support folks working hard to support all of our Office 365 customers across the world.

That said, our Microsoft partners absolutely do have a role to play here - and many partners will offer support services. For some customers, it's appropriate for them to work with a partner and for that partner to deliver proactive/reactive support services to the customer. This is especially true for customers who have very large and complex environments to manage and need something more than break/fix support. However, Microsoft also offers advanced paid-for services too. The choice is one for our customers to make themselves based on their own requirements. Much like any service on offer, you as the customer should decide who you'd like to deliver that service. And your choice will be dependent on the type of service, quality, and cost offered by the provider.

In summary then, we absolutely are investing in improving both the customer facing support experience in the Office 365 Admin Center, and the internal ticket management system that our Office 365 teams use. We are also changing (or in many cases, have already changed) the structure of our teams to enable us to deliver faster, high-quality support. In addition, there are many more investments happening - both within Office 365 support, and more broadly across the entire Microsoft support organization - to allow us to continue delivering a support service that meets the demands of our customers today.

One final note: I'm not the official spokesperson for Microsoft support, the comments above are my own based on my understanding and interpretation of what's happening. I don't have insight into each and every change, so it's always possible that other work or change is happening that I'm not personally aware of. I've worked in various support teams at Microsoft for the past 19 years and I'm personally involved in, or project managing, some of the improvement projects I've talked about.