How can I escalate issues in Office 365?

[Mark Weusten]

I have had a support case running with 365 for a couple of weeks. They close the ticket over the New Zealand weekend because of time differences, I reopen it and then have to provide the same information again. My question is, how can I escalate poor service?

Cheers

Mark

[#2]

Hi @Ken Ip,

Sorry to hear that you've been without outbound e-mail for the last few days. I can see that you've sent several NDR examples - thanks for providing the information to help the team to troubleshoot.

I've sent a message over to the folks who manage this team to see what we can do to expedite this one to get you back up-and-running.

-thanks, Russell.

[#3]

Hi @Deleted,

To your first question, 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.

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. 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. Next week for example I'm on business travel to Redmond, Washington and will be leading a workshop all week! This leaves little time for community participation.

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 ambassador 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". 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.

All that said, I did take a look at your support ticket and I've sent feedback over to the folks who manage this team. I don't see any notes in the ticket to explain why the support ambassador believes EX131895 is the cause here. I don't think you'll see this in your Service Health Dashboard because this outage doesn't currently appear to be impacting you. Maybe the issue has since been resolved, or maybe the SI was mis-keyed by the support ambassador. Whatever the case, only the support ambassador who supported you can answer this.

I hope we can get this sorted for you soon. Let me know how it goes.

-thanks, Russell.

[#4]

Thanks very much Russell for the detailed response. I appreciate you taking the time to check on the ticket as well.   I'll follow up with the original contact to see what they can add.   

[#5]

Issue has been resolved this morning by removing domain name from MS block list.

Thanks Russell for the help!

[#6]

@Russell Read, we too are experiencing troubles getting any communication on open tickets and a few of them closed without any communication at all (no emails or phone calls).  We have opened tickets under different users trying to get a response from anyone.  We finally received some response on one of the tickets and provided the requested logs, but now we have not heard back in several days.  The tickets are noted below.  You can see some of the tickets we did not get any response, so we have no ambassador to reach out to.  There needs to be some method to escalate when there is absolutely no communication.  The one we did get an ambassador assigned, but no response.  Our issue is becoming more widespread in our organization and luckily the people affected have been very patient to date.  
Ticket #7778027
Ticket #7377186
Ticket #7596064
Ticket #7690357

[#7]

@Russell Read, we too are experiencing troubles getting any communication on open tickets and a few of them closed without any communication at all (no emails or phone calls).  We have opened tickets under different users trying to get a response from anyone.  We finally received some response on one of the tickets and provided the requested logs, but now we have not heard back in several days.  The tickets are noted below.  You can see some of the tickets we did not get any response, so we have no ambassador to reach out to.  There needs to be some method to escalate when there is absolutely no communication.  The one we did get an ambassador assigned, but no response.  Our issue is becoming more widespread in our organization and luckily the people affected have been very patient to date.  
Ticket #7778027
Ticket #7377186
Ticket #7596064
Ticket #7690357

[#8]

Hi @Mark Holman,

Thanks for sharing your experience and sorry that we haven't responded with a solution to the problem you reported.

I've sent your feedback and the list of open tickets to the team manager. Hopefully we can quickly find out what's causing the delay and have one of our ambassadors work with you to resolve the problem.

Keep me posted on how things progress.

-thanks, Russell.

[#9]

@Russell Read,

Thank you so much for pushing on this for us.  I have since received an email from an ambassador/manager with a scheduled call for today.  Obviously no resolution yet, but just getting some response is a good first step.  It is a helpless feeling having no avenue to take in that situation.  I am sure many others feel the same.  It sparked conversations on our end about migrating back to on-prem.  There is no way we can have critical business applications not functioning with no way to reach support.  I completely understand driving people to the portal for issues, but there must be a way to escalate when there is no response.  Thanks again

[#10]

Hi @Mark Holman,

Good to hear that there's some movement - I hope the next time you post it's with the good news that we've fixed your issue :)

Regarding feeling helpless, this is the exact opposite of what we're trying to achieve with our support experience, however, I too have been on the receiving end of support experiences like this with other companies and I know how frustrating it is.

There are a mix of factors at play when you look at a support experience. If I pick just three - the tools, process, and the people - there's a lot of opportunity there for things to go awry. We are currently in the process of modernizing our support experiences by making our tools simpler for both our customers and our support teams, we are simplifying our processes, and we're changing the way we train and educate our people.

Many of our improvements are focussed on the experience that the majority of our customers see; however, we are also invested in solving for all customer scenarios - including the one you describe of feeling helpless. Of course, making a customer feel helpless isn't something we baked into the design of the support experience, so we'll always do everything we can to avoid that from happening! But we are indeed talking about the options we have to remove that feeling of helplessness from customers in the times when things don't go quite to plan.

In the meantime, you're stuck with me I'm afraid. I can't personally scale to help everybody, but I do read every piece of feedback that's sent. And for every piece of feedback I read, you should know that somebody somewhere at Microsoft is getting a note from me with an idea, a suggestion, or prompting a question to be asked that will ultimately help us to deliver an even better experience in the future.

Keep the feedback coming.

...and as an aside for anybody who didn't read this entire thread - the very first port of call for chasing up your support ticket is to contact the support ambassador who's assisting you. Just tell them what you need and what your expectations are. I'm not here 24x7 and don't consider me a real-time tool for getting a follow-up on a ticket. But I'll help where I can :)

-thanks, Russell.

[#11]

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[#12]

Hi @Angel Gonzalez,

Thanks for flagging this. I've taken a look at the tickets and I can't tell you exactly what happened by reading the notes alone, so I've engaged the managers of this team to investigate and asked for somebody to review the technical aspect to see if this is an issue that needs to be escalated for further investigation. Regardless, somebody should get back to you with an update.

For the first, it looks like we didn't receive any replies from you into the system, so I suspect this is what triggered the first to be closed. My guess would be that the second was accidentally closed as it was a duplicate of the first... which is normally appropriate - however if the first ticket was also closed, that's an error on our part! The third was closed after the support ambassador provided the "resolution". From reading the notes in the ticket alone and not being up-to-speed with the ins and outs of spam filtering, I'm not the best judge - but in my opinion, I'd say that we didn't provide you with an appropriate/full answer.

Regarding our support teams closing tickets, it's not in their interest to prematurely close a ticket. When a ticket is closed, you should be prompted to fill out a short survey and give a star-rating for the support experience you received. We use these ratings to monitor how our teams are doing and to validate that customers are happy with the experience they received. I don't think I see any feedback in the system yet from you on these three tickets - but I'd encourage everybody to complete these very short surveys because they help to us to improve the service our teams deliver.

Keep me posted with how it progresses. I hope we can get you a full answer shortly.

-thanks, Russell.

[#13]

@Russell Read,

I forgot to provide an update on our issue.  We were promptly contacted by a manager and assigned a new senior level engineer.  The engineer had us go through many of the same troubleshooting steps all of which were already documented in at least one of our previous tickets, but I can appreciate the need to confirm.  This engineer was stumped and reached out to someone within their subscription/authentication group (I think).  Once we connected with this person later in the day, he knew within 2 minutes what the issue was.  It is a known issue as documented here https://support.microsoft.com/en-my/help/4025962/can-t-sign-in-after-update-to-office-2016-build-16-...  

I am glad we came to resolution, but obviously was frustrated with what it took to get us here.  The lack of communication, closing of unresolved tickets, and the fact that none of the previous support folks that actually responded were able to identify this.  Again, I am glad we have answers here and I am hopeful the team at Microsoft will work through these support issues.

Thanks for escalating this for us.  The manager too was apologetic and said steps were being taken on their end to prevent this in the future.

Mark

[#14]

@Russell Read

Hi Russel,

We have an issue for two weeks now where an emailadress is blocked, but this customer his  EOP is broken so we dont have an action center to release it. Support keeps asking for different logs, screenshot, browser logs, screen captures etc just so they dont have to work the case. Poweshell doesnt have the cmdlet available. All our other customers have no issue. We also created a phonenumber especially for Microsoft support so they dont have an excuse for not understanding our phone menu. [Ticket #:7850194]

[#15]

Hi @Leslie van der Hoek,

Thanks for sharing your feedback; I've sent this over to the managers of the team who are working your active support ticket.

I'm not an EOP expert, so I'm not in the best position to pass judgement on the quality of this support interaction, but I can tell you that the support teams don't intentionally try to avoid working on support tickets by asking for logs/screenshots etc. They are asking for this because they are trying to understand what's causing the problem, and having this additional information often helps them to pinpoint the issue and deliver a solution.

In your support ticket, I can see that the ambassador has been actively discussing the issue with one of our technical leads and again during a review of open tickets. The request for additional information came from those reviews.

I appreciate that it's frustrating when a problem can't be solved immediately, but it's definitely in the interest of the ambassador and Microsoft to resolve problems so that customers like you can keep using the service and so that we can move on and assist other customers.

Let me know if things improve.

-thanks, Russell.

[#16]

@Russell Read

Hi Russel,

Appreciate your quick reply. Its just we cant sell this to our customers.  Their main email address has been blocked for nearly two weeks now. Just had a remote session and it was because of the time and language difference mainly they were saying.   We had to get rid of services before where the support just wasnt cutting it. If we had any onpremise solution we had solved this within minutes.

[#17]

How about when they just leave the ticket open for days? I find it very difficult to accept some of the answers that level one provides.  They clearly do not grasp complex issues. Very, very frustrating.  If I get a link to user voice one more time I might explode.

[#18]

How about when they just leave the ticket open for days? I find it very difficult to accept some of the answers that level one provides.  They clearly do not grasp complex issues. Very, very frustrating.  If I get a link to user voice one more time I might explode.

[#19]

Can you help with 

Ticket #8012075?

Shows closed in my admin dashboard, they tech keeps calling me back repeating everything.  I have asked several times to escalate and never hear anything.  Keeps insisting that the product team has been consulted on this sharing problem.  Very frustrating.  

Bottom line is that there should not be preview, share, or copy link menu items for links to site pages if indeed they are not "designed" that way and only for external links.  In fact, if the system is not designed to share links to other pages from other lists in SP, then the user should not be presented with that option!  This is trivial, but confuses our users and they just continue to avoid SharePoint which sucks for me as the guy that has been forced to promote it and it sucks for Microsoft because everyone thinks SharePoint is riddled with half baked functionality.  I cringe at the thought of having to open a support ticket!

[#20]

@Russell Read I'm glad you're interested in and following this and similar threads in the community.  I hope that beyond just servicing your interest you're able to share information up the line which will make positive change in the Office 365 experience for everyone.

I know this isn't an escalation forum, but I'm going to start by inviting you to review my issue anyway.  Those are #7825985,  #7644160, and #30126-6412441 (an older system I guess?).  In particularly I'll draw your attention to #7825985 and my response on 3 May 2018 at 15:41 PDT, to which I haven't had a response and don't believe I'll be receiving one.  I'm very glad if you can goose anybody on that topic.

To the more general topic: I think it's a given that Microsoft perceives little benefit, even cost savings, in providing poor service at any level, and in particular for a product that is key to their strategic plans like Office 365.   The only reason it should happen then, is because of a failure of perception, or a failure of intervention.  Here, then, for however much it helps,  is a bullet point of things I think about my O365 Support interactions in the 8 months since we migrated to O365:

• I don't think that it matters at all whether support is provided by senior VPs, 3rd party contractors in Bangladesh, or the self-aware copy of Windows 2020 running the call-center on your secret moon base.  Quality is about solving, mitigating, or at least acknowledging and documenting.
• I don't think that support technicians at any level should be allowed to close a ticket EVER without express written consent of the customer, or an override by a highly placed manager (or the moon-computer).
• It is the height of folly to believe that the same resources which try to answer a question asked by, say, my mom, are in a position to respond to any question that I could conceivably call to ask.  One of the most important tasks for support is to as quickly as possible figure if it's me or my mom on the phone and to put us together with the right team.
  
  • My mom is way more tech savvy than she'd have you believe though.
• Stubbornly soldiering on in the face of dissonance brings rapidly diminishing returns.  It doesn't matter if it's because of a communication barrier, or supporting the wrong cricket team.  Escalate or at least reassign as soon as you see it.
• Talking on the telephone is nice and immediate but I hate phones.  Bring back the "E-mail me" button, please. 
  • E-mail is self-documenting.  For phone calls you have to rely on the technician's accuracy in reporting.  When they say I'm too stupid to understand the answer they gave me, it's entirely subjective when recording the details of a phone conversation.   If we're working over e-mail the evidence is right there in print.

[#21]

Is anyone who can help on immediate basis on office 365 ticket, support team is not responding for last two days despite of continuous follow up on email.

[#22]

Good luck with that, my issue is been going on for three months now, we basically gave up trying to get our issue fixed