Forum Discussion
Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..
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?
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.
- RussellRead
Microsoft
VasilMichev Correct, Anne is in a different position. I'm happy for folks to @mention me and I will continue sending feedback to the teams who are delivering these experiences so that they can take action where needed on open tickets and can consider how the process/tools/people need to improve in the future.
- RussellRead
Thanks 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.
Russell
It has probably been a couple of months but my experiences with Microsoft O365 support have been better than expected both for timeliness and quality of support. Others in my company have not been as fortunate but I think that is the nature of the support process - much depends on who you get.
You refer to investments in improving the support experience. However, yesterday I was told by a partner that "MS is transitioning away from handling any type of support altogether, and pushing this responsibility on to the partners." and that I should be transitioning to them for support.
I got the impression that they were getting this from Microsoft and that it was more than just an effort to sell more services. However, it doesn't quite match with your comments about an initiative to improve support. Or is the direction that only partners will have access to "good" support and user companies are to make support arrangements with a partner? Any comment?
- RussellRead
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.
So here is my experience with a recent incident.
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.
