Forum Discussion
How can I escalate issues in Office 365?
MicrosoftHi Ron_Rufo,
From reading the case notes, it looks like the case was escalated yesterday. I see a note from the first phone call you had with our team saying that you wanted to escalate.
It looks like the escalation engineer you are speaking with attempted to contact you yesterday and again today.
Now that you've responded with the information they requested, I'm sure that troubleshooting can continue and, if needed, the support team will escalate if it's believed to be a bug or problem that requires our engineering team to get involved.
Just to be clear, no part of my official job is related to looking at or dealing with escalations and nor do I have a special way to get cases escalated. But it's a great time to remind people who I am and why I try to engage in some of these community discussions.
The following text is an edited/updated version of a post I previously posted in this thread and is a good place to start if you found this page because you need help with an active support case.
If you found this thread and are thinking "Oh great, if I contact Russell he'll be able to get my case escalated for me", sadly no, this isn't the preferred way to get support or get a ticket escalated 🙂
We receive thousands of support tickets every day and we have thousands of folks in our support teams across the world who are working hard to resolve those tickets to get customers up-and-running as quickly as possible. Sometimes, it takes longer to resolve some cases than others. At times, it takes our teams longer to respond to customers if we see increased volume of cases.
I participate in the community because I'm genuinely interested to hear feedback - good and bad - from customers who are engaging with our Office 365 support teams. My core role at Microsoft is to ensure our teams are ready to support customers. My work is primarily focussed on partnering with our engineering and marketing teams to stay close to new feature development to ensure we've got a plan to get our teams ready to support those new features when they are deployed. Of course, I don't do this alone - my immediate team and a host of folks in our global virtual teams work together to make this happen.
When I hear that the support experience hasn't met the high bar we set for ourselves, I want to know why. Was it because we didn't equip our teams with the right information? Did one of our processes break? Do we have an issue with our tools? Whatever the problem, I want to know because if there's an opportunity for my team to do something differently to avoid the problem in the future, we can address that.
Then, of course, there are issues that aren't within the immediate control of my team. In these cases, I send the feedback over to the folks who manage the support team. These folks will then take action so that the feedback gets to the right team or individual allowing us to learn and hopefully do better next time.
As I don't work 24x7 and have a day-job and family, I'm not always as present in the community as I'd like to be. When I'm deeply involved in projects or development work, or out on vacation, it might be a while before I see a message. Therefore, if you need "immediate" assistance, contacting me isn't the best plan.
So, what is the right way to get help? For the majority of our customers, they get the help they need very quickly and have no cause to need to "escalate". However, when things don't go to plan, the first avenue should be to work with the support team who's working on your support ticket. Ask them why it's taking longer than expected to resolve your issue. Ask them what their next steps are to assist you. Ask them to help you understand why they are asking you for certain information or why they are asking you to complete certain troubleshooting steps.
I'll often have customers say to me "I don't know why support asked me to do x, y, or z because I knew that it wouldn't make a difference" or "I know that this problem is a bug in the product". In reality, the steps that you are being asked to follow often help customers to resolve issues, or serve to collect valuable information that can be used to inform the next steps or escalation.
If you don't think you are getting the help you need, ask the support ambassador what's needed before they will escalate the ticket. Every person in the support organization wants to resolve your ticket as quickly as possible. If you don't get what you need or things don't improve, you should see the e-mail address for the tech lead and/or manager for the support team listed in the e-mail signature of the person who e-mailed you. You can contact the tech lead/manager to tell them that you aren't getting what you need.
That said, I'm always happy to hear from anybody who's engaged with our support teams and am happy to chat privately or in this forum to respond to feedback.
-thanks, Russell.
I appreciate your comments and helps. Many times you have given others a suggestion and it will get their case moving for them. I have had this case open for over 6 months. I am attempting to create a user and it shows that the user already exist. We have created another address so this user can send and receive emails but we would like to resolve the conflict in the system. I'm sure that a lot of notes exist in the ticket notes. It is [Ticket #:14448181] Deleting of Alias for Kyle. Without warning, the MS support closed the case Dec 1. I did leave a 'disappointed' feedback when I received the 'close' notification by email and left a request for a callback in the notes. I've waited 1 month and thought you might give me some suggestions. Thank you very much!
This is very scary. I have been working and depending on Microsoft support for 3 decades, help on SEV1 and 2 incidents, and always got a response within 20 mins, escalation within 30mins. With all said, depending and recieving break-fix solutions and reports from Microsoft helping companies with runbook solutions for technologies. Having an existing case, getting unheard of responses, and first experience of no knowledge base support of the technology offered by MSFT, then reading this post is absolutely scary. I am a Microsoft house, I support big IT/10,000 seat+ that are also Microsoft houses. To know this is the direction of support by Microsoft is not only shameful but also scary that is the direction of Microsoft and can lead or teach other dependent global application companies to go the same direction. My case number is 23650870, I haven't created a ticket in more than year, but for the first time I have doubts about being a Microsoft house now and future-tense.
I need to add my case to this list: #21350853
After being promised a callback from a manager this morning, 40+ hours of my billable time and several tickets, I am in damage control mode with 2 of my clients. One of them because following a migration many of their email contents and attachment are missing (and each failed attempt at migration causes further disruption), and the other because I have had to put off starting their migration due to trying to fix this mess.
I never received a call from a manager as promised, but instead the ticket in question was simply closed with no comment.
My view on this is that engineers are just trying to sweep the issue under the carpet and hope it goes away. They are basically out of their depth, and unwilling to take responsibility for that.
I am amazed at how Microsoft can create such a culture.
The level 1 support is usually less than useful, because on frequent occasions I have been given not only advice that would waste my time, or fundamentally failed to grasp the requirement, context and utilise any kind of common sense; but often that advice would lead to disruptive results for my clients.
The fact that there is no proper system for having a manager step in to mediate expert advice is incredible. I can attest that the level of knowledge, expertise, and attitude of engineers varies massively.More often than not I have been pointing out things to engineers that they would have missed, or discovering next steps that actually lead somewhere useful through my own research.
This is simply not good enough.
Russell, I need your help with this case and I wish to escalate:
Hi RussellRead ,
We are facing create file/copy file/move file issue with Power-Platform(MS-Flow). I think it is a bug on Microsoft power-platform.
All troubleshooting steps were already performed but the support engineer handling this case and they are also waiting for another backend engineer for respond from last 1 month.
They doesn't seem to understand the urgency of this issue.
Our Support request number: 120012121000227,
we'll appreciate if you could help us push this case to be escalated to backend team.
Thanks,
Santosh Kalange
- RussellRead
Thanks for your note. I sent you an e-mail so that we can follow-up on this one.
-thanks, Russell.
