M365 Administrator Feedback Request | SharePoint Support Central Experience

[Sam Larson]

Every month, thousands of M365 Administrators turn to Support Central to engage in various self-help options. Support issues can vary in complexity and while sometimes you want to talk to a support agent directly, in other situations it's more convenient to solve the topic independently via articles , diagnostics or other self-help solutions. In one of my previous posts, I explained how administrators can engage with Support Central to run diagnostics for SharePoint and OneDrive. In this update, I want to dive into some of the other capabilities that our team works on within Support Central as well as ask you for your direct feedback and how we can improve our solutions.

Let’s dive into the details…

What is Support Central?

Support Central is the area within the M365 Admin center where administrators go to engage directly with support agents or other self-help solutions. To access this area, simply navigate to Microsoft 365 Admin Center > Support > New Service Request. Once you are in Support Central you will receive self-help solutions based on your specific query as well as have the option to engage directly with agents. These solutions, based on the query you provided, are run through telemetry and machine learning to provide you with the best possible answer. Based on this information, we not only point you to further relevant resources - such as diagnostics, videos, or help articles - but in many cases, we also directly recommend a specific action for you in-line to solve the problem.

 

Quickly engage with support central via the “New Service Request” button in the M365 Admin Center.

Get solutions specifically catered to your help query based on machine learning. You can see above that one customer is getting assistance with optimizing SharePoint Migration performance while another is running a diagnostic on OneDrive Quota.

Learning from your feedback!

The OneDrive and SharePoint supportability teams are looking for your feedback on the current Support Central experience  – What can we change to ensure you as Administrators have the best possible experience and resources when troubleshooting or learning within the product?  

Please take a few minutes to complete our survey regarding diagnostics and self-help solutions. Please ensure you are authorized to provide this information and not violating any company policies. Your responses will be kept confidential with restricted access. For more information, see the Microsoft Privacy Statement. If you have questions about this survey, please contact TechCommunity@microsoft.com

Additional resources:

• How to troubleshoot issues in Sharepoint Online and OneDrive with diagnostics
• Improving the Office 365 Support Experience
• Contact support for business products - Admin Help

Thanks, Sam Larson, Supportability Program Manager - Microsoft 

[PeterRising]

I would say from my own experience that the option to log a support ticket is not obvious enough.  A lot of emphasis is put on the self help options.  Most admins in my experience will be coming for support after already exploring self help options and may find it frustrating to be directed to generic articles, but I understand it is important to show this by the same token.  I would however encourage drawing more attention to the ability to get immediate assistance by opening a support ticket.

In addition to this, I favour email communication over a telephone call.  When I select this as my contact preference, I find that the support agent will regularly ignore this and try to call me as the first response.  It would be good if they could acknowledge the contact preference selection.  

Above anything though, I would like an online chat option for support.  This would make things so much easier.

[Steven Andrews]

Hi @Sam Larson 

Thanks for posting this for us and for inviting community opinion.

Rather perversely I think I preferred the older way of getting help.  Going through the self-help options often feels like an obligation that you need to suffer in order to actually log a call.  Not to dissimilar to mashing any button in a support call with your bank as you want to get through the IVR and actually talk to someone.  In particular I miss the ability to select which technology I need assistance with, with the diagnostic tool now effectively doing this for us.  Seeing a call bounced to the right team post submission can be avoided.

I do acknowledge that this is a rather new and young way to offer support and have some degree of trust that it can be improved.

[Sam Larson]

Thanks for the feedback @Steven Andrews and @PeterRising! I truly appreciate the insights.

@PeterRising - I'm sorry to hear you have had some struggles with the contact preference option, I'm going to follow up on that one . Feel free to PM me any support cases this occurred on.

@Steven Andrews - Completely understand this take and we certainly don't want to make the experience more painful. We are hoping to get some of our SharePoint diagnostics tools possibly moved to a new location so the experience may not seem as forced when typing in a help query or creating a ticket. That being said, we do try to cater our OneDrive and SharePoint solutions to very specific issues and I hope that some of the content helps!