A Tale of Verification

It took four months but I was finally verified. I'm sharing my story to help others and show how utterly broken this process is. It's so bad that I have to wonder if it's to artificially keep the amount of partners low or some sort of psychological experiment. Only those stubborn and foolish enough to keep trying for months are worthy to be an almighty partner.

Jill, assuming you're a real person, I appreciate that you're the only representative who will even talk to us. It's not your fault that you're moderating a forum in a subject you have no knowledge or control over, but some of your responses have been dismissive or incorrect since the material you're working with is incorrect. For example, "This application is insufficient for the requirements of the program. At this point, we are unable to provide any further Support." is simply a canned response I received on my very first ticket; prospective partners can keep appealing (how many times? no one knows).

I wish it worked the way all of the resources you link propose it does. We aren't all incompetent. Might I suggest that Microsoft attempt to audit themselves by anonymously following their own instructions? You don't even need to register a real company since all verification is done via unreliable documents. No one clicked the legitimate Whois and government links I sent.

Here are some things I encountered, off the top of my head:

• For the majority of the process, there was no way for me to upload documents on the website, forcing me to open tickets and be subjected to what I theorize are real people who use a poorly coded AI to "verify" documentation.
• Microsoft articles are inconsistent or horribly outdated. No one knows what's going on, not even the AI that gave me conflicting (and wrong) answers.
• There was nowhere to input a DUNS number but I was luckily never asked to submit one.
• The "Fix now" button did nothing until the very end when it suddenly started to work, but it just wasted my time.
• Speaking of wasted time, the partner dashboard is the slowest website I've visited in recent memory.
• Generic email addresses like "support" or "help" aren't valid, you must use your name. Fine, but changing my email address and attempting to verify it resulted in an error code and no verification email. Microsoft support was useless whenever I submitted bug reports. I don't even remember how I got past this step, I think I created another user on the organization and restarted the process with the new email.
• The third-party verification app fails silently on older phones.
• I would periodically lose identity verification status while waiting for employment verification. If this happened while waiting for a ticket response, the support agent wouldn't even acknowledge the step I was really on, so I had to check and re-verify every day just in case I received a reply. The last time this happened, I was trying to get developer verification which doesn't even require identity verification.
• There was no way to respond via the web interface without uploading an image, so I uploaded my verified identity success screenshot. I didn't get a response, forcing me to open another ticket.
• I was told I hadn't satisfied a step when I clearly had a green check mark next to it and in some cases had completed it multiple times.
• Support isn't allowed to go off script, possibly because they aren't real, even when you are having a comical mental breakdown in a ticket.
• I think the main issue people are encountering is that they're sending in piecemeal documentation that satisfies all requirements when looked at separately, but no one is looking at it separately; it must all be in one document for an AI to read. This is not disclosed.
• You must make sure your PDFs (forget images) are readable by AI. Copy paste them into a text document to ensure legibility. This is not disclosed.
• Even if the document has everything required and is readable by AI, they might reply with the exact same response requesting the same document that you just sent them.
• When I achieved partner, I wasn't informed for over a week and kept receiving "Thank you for reaching out!" emails.

It took me another month to get past developer verification. Why is there not one single verification process? Why is domain verification not complete as soon as I update my CNAME/MX records, a requirement for even using my account? Why, why, why...

Good luck everyone. Hopefully I don't randomly lose verification like I have my sanity!