Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..

[DanielHuberICX]

Just wonder how you perceive this. I post this here since I have not found a better place to do so. If I discuss this with a support person, all I get is an apology and that they cannot change it...

Over the last, let's say 8-10 months, Office 365 support has dropped in responsiveness dramatically.

That is, if I open a support case for an Office 365 tenant, the admin portal tells me that I will be contacted within 30 minutes. I would also accept 60 minutes or even 2 hours. But fact is that for all the tickets I've opened in the last 8 months, my waiting time for someone contacting me was between 2 days and 2 weeks (!).  Adding a note to the ticket every day or so does not help. It still tells me that I am being contacted in 30 minutes, but nothing happens. 

Now, I am working for a Microsoft partner. That means that I am using the Office 365 partner portal, accessing many tenants from there for support. 

If someone from support does actually contact me, they usually ask me for more information. However, the email I get does indicate the ticket number only. Also in the text they usually write, they do not offer a hint for which problem they contact me. In the partner portal, there is no overall view of all open tickets for all tenants. This means that I need to maintain an own list of ticket numbers with problem description. Or I need to dive in to each tenant and try to find the ticket. 

Suggestion: There should be a list on the partner portal level across all tenants.. 

Sometimes I get an email message telling me that they have unsuccessfully contacted me on my phone number(s). Yet if I check my incoming call log, there was no attempt listed at all. There may be several possible reasons for that, but I am suspicious. 

As soon as I am contacted successfully by phone, I usually have to tell those support people that I am not the average user but an experienced Office 365 admin. Otherwise I am asked very silly base level questions. Although my problem description should give them a hint that I usually do not have simple user level issues. 

Sometimes the first level support does not have the right level of knowledge. Once they realize that, my ticket is eventually forwarded to another engineer (there seems to be some kind of penalty when they do that. how else could I explain that they sometimes hesitate to do so).

I would have assumed that the information collected would be forwarded too. But that does not seem the case. In one of the recent tickets, I was asked by 3 (!) different engineers to repeat (!) virtually the same troubleshooting steps, each time in 1-2 hour live screen sharing sessions. Each engineer did find the same issues again. When the ticket was assigned to engineer number 4, I refused to do the troubleshooting once again and asked him to consult with the engineers having done the troubleshooting before. He did.. and the result was that the problem was found. 

I do not have issues with the support engineers. Especially the 2nd level engineers are very helpful and skilled. 1st level is mixed. One can be lucky and get someone on the phone who is good. Most of the time they have, however, consult with their group leader or something like that. 

Last issue I have is that once the problem is solved and/or the ticket is closed, I am asked to fill out a questionnaire. The problem I have with this is that it only asks about the support in general and the performance of the support staff. 

There is no question that would give me a chance to rate the response time. So I do have to rate the overall support as BAD, which is in fact very unfair to the support engineer. But there is no other way to get attention into the system. 

Anyone has similar experiences with Office 365 support?

I have to say that Office 365 support about a year ago was first class and super fast.

Not anymore, though..

Daniel

[#2]

I hope this doesn't jinx me but, by coincidence, just after reading this post nobody was at our help desk and I was contacted by one of our users with an issue. I couldn't solve it so I opened a ticket with Office 365 support. 

I got a call in about half an hour and explained the issue. I gave the support engineer the user's contact information since he was in a different city. Fifteen minutes later I got an email from the user and a call from the support engineer saying it was resolved. 

Sometimes things do work the way they are supposed to!

[#3]

I don't mean to sound like an old man but with over 25 years of IT experience I have seen this scenario play out over and over.  It used to be when a smaller company gets bought by a bigger one, I am looking at your Network Solutions, the support was responsive with the little guy then it goes South with the bigger company.  It happened again when Cisco bought a company called IronPort good luck getting proper support with Cisco now, it is a black abyss.  We have not migrated to O365 yet, we are one of the last hold outs, but our time is coming, and I know two things are certain, their prices will only increase and their level of support will only decrease.  No one cares more about your systems (servers, apps, etc.) than you do, keep them on prem as long as you can.

[#4]

@J 1901

There are many reasons why the support experience varies between small and large companies, but that doesn't mean to say that support from large companies should be expected to be bad.

This particular thread predominantly attracts those who've got stuck in the system and need help, but we help thousands of customers every day and aim to respond very quickly with the intent of solving that problem on the first contact.

We don't always get this right and some problems are unfortunately more tricky to solve than others. There are lots of folks at Microsoft working in the background who are passionate about making significant improvements to our support experience and I believe the support experience you'll receive from Microsoft will only continue to improve.

Keeping services on prem is currently absolutely the right decision for some people, but for many others moving to online brings significant benefits. Don't worry, I'm not here trying to sell :)

[#5]

Hi @Daniel Niccoli,

Thanks for the feedback and good to hear that you had some great support experiences in the early days. Sorry to hear that your more recent experiences haven't lived up to that standard.

In short, we've made a lot of changes in the past two years and the guys who answered the phones were indeed advising that you open an online ticket due to some limitations we had as we rolled out new tools.

In the online support experience, there are now fewer boxes and no dropdowns to select from because we are switching to a smarter way of identifying and routing tickets to a person who can help you. Rather than asking customers to do the work to categorize their ticket, our systems now look at the descriptive text you've entered and use that to display content that can help you to resolve your issue. Additionally, your text helps our systems determine where to route your ticket to.

Opening a ticket online generally is the best way to initiate a support ticket and our teams are working hard to respond to those tickets quickly. There are times when we see a lot of tickets created at the same time and this causes delays as we work to connect with each customer, but we continue to look at ways to better predict (and staff for) the times that we'll see tickets arriving.

We have a program of continual improvements and I hope that you'll start to experience and see these improvements if you need to contact support in the future. We know that we've still got work to do, and we'll never stop looking for ways to improve.

-thanks, Russell.

[#6]

Yes, I've noticed the same problem after help center modernization. When function of choosing category and subcategory in the support ticket has been retired - the level of support dropped dramatically. Before it took more time to create a ticket, to choose a proper category and make detailed description of the issue, but it was worth the effort. I had always quality responses and fast call-back, sometimes even no call just email where were fixes to my issue.

Now you need to repeat several times your issue, screen sharing session and still sometimes engineers don't understand your issue or ask you to do elementary fix steps which you've already did, and described that you did.

I would love to have back old help center experience.

Other thing that annoys me, it's  when support engineers is asking you to rate their support level while the session isn't closed, and waiting on the line, looking on your screen which rate you will give. 

[#7]

so true @ievgeniia viazankina

[#8]

Yup, sometime we wonder why we pay them for? We use Google G Suite and there is a number we can just call or even chat with a live living person!

[#9]

oh Sir Russell how I wish you were a fly on the wall during my last two Microsoft "Technical" Support case calls, and I use the term "technical" loosely, lol, ha ha

I would just love to keep the "Engineers" attention on our call for 2 minutes, seems like they have a dozen Chat windows open and keep regurgitating the same standard rubber stamped replies, example:

Me: Hi, I would like to know how to enable Rights Management on my O365 portal?

Respnse: Hello I am so and so and I am dedicated to helping you and only you, I will solve all of your problems, what issue are you calling about?

Me: um... read my first statement

and round and round it goes

[#10]

100% agree.  Support has been terrible for the last 6 months or more.  The new online ticketing system is awful too.  The only way I get a resource that is helpful is if I open a sev A ticket.  Anything lower has been a waste of time.  Not sure what's going on, but SharePoint online resources used to be really, really good.  Now they just ask the same questions over and over and rarely find a resolution.  Very disappointing and frustrating.  

[#11]

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. 

[#12]

@J 1901 and @Luke Hoffman

Thanks for taking the time to send feedback. I'm currently out for the holidays for a few weeks; however, I saw your posts so wanted to at least get an initial response out to you.

Contacting support should be a worry-free experience that gets you a solution to your problem quickly. We know that sometimes this isn't possible - but it absolutely is how we design the system to work. If we're not delivering, you are right to call us out on it.

I had to contact the tech support department of a tech company yesterday for an issue I was having with some home automation hardware. The experience was terrible! I spent over an hour on the phone and was forced to repeat the same steps, in the same order, more than 10 times! While I was performing these futile steps, a few things went through my mind.

First - I'm absolutely confident that the experience I received was not the experience that the company wanted me to have. If they ever listen back to the call, I'm sure it will be used as an example of how NOT to deliver support and how to drive your customer insane.

Second - the net of my support experience is that I most likely have defective hardware, so no amount of hand-holding was going to solve my problem.

Third - the person who was helping me was either new, inexperienced, or poorly equipped to do their job. Lack of training or poor quality training or lack of access to more experienced resources.

As I think of the problems I was hitting in my own support experience, I think about how we equip our support teams to help our customers. It's absolutely possible that we face some of the same challenges I call out above - but it's certainly not how we design the system to work and we invest constantly to bring improvements to both the technology that powers the support experience and the people who deliver the service.

I can't explain why your support experiences in the past months haven't met the high bar we set, but I can tell you that we certainly didn't do anything detrimental to result in such a change. If anything, we're doing quite the opposite. Our teams are moving away from scripted interactions, we are adopting a growth mindset in our approach and using our "failures" as opportunities to learn, and we continue to build our tooling based on the feedback from both customers and our support teams.

Regarding fiddler traces - or the ask to collect any other logs, screenshots, error messages etc. - none of these are tactics to "buy time". If the frontline teams don't have the expertise or tools to analyse the information, they will be sending it to (or might have already been asked to request it by) our more experienced folks. In many of our teams now, we have a mix of "frontline" and "escalation" resources so that the experience is part of a single team which enables individuals to develop and solutions to be delivered faster.

All that said, if you aren't having a good support experience, let the person who's helping you know. In many cases, you should see their manager's contact details in e-mail communications that are sent to you. You can provide feedback to the manager directly (if available) or provide the feedback directly to the support person you are working with.

If you still don't see an improvement, I'd love to hear from you to find out why things aren't going well.

A few notes on this to set expectations for anybody else who happens to be reading:

1. I don't work 24x7 and I'm not "the escalation guy" :) If I'm slow to respond it because I'm taking care of my day job (or on vacation!)

2. Sending a case number to me doesn't magically = faster solution. I'm interested in specific cases because it helps me to see what opportunities we should be following-up on to improve our service. I always provide cases to the managers/leaders of the team so that they can take action where required.

3. It's always best to have a conversation with the support person who's helping you. Whether it feels like it or not, they are human and they are doing their best to help. If they understand your concern or complaint, they might be able to do something immediately to resolve it.

Thanks again for sending the feedback. If you have specific examples you'd like me to take a look at, you can PM me and I'll look at them when I'm back after the holidays.

If you are lucky enough to be taking time off over the next few weeks, I hope you enjoy a relaxing break.

-Russell.

[#13]

@Russell Read 

I would like to thank you publicly for all your efforts to try and investigate the issues I have raised with you. I know that you have tried your best and for that I am very appreciative.

But the sad reality is it is not getting any better, my working life is being ruined by having to raise cases with the office 365 support team. Out of 10 issues raised this year only 2 have been dealt with correctly and in a timely fashion.

I dread having to contact the support team as most the time it a frustrating loop of "have you tried this, have you tried that, can you send me a screenshot of the error message that you already have pasted in the ticket when you raised it." and asking all the questions you would ask of a novice user and  they cut and paste standard questions that are not related to the issue that you are encountering.

I search all the forums, documentation and status pages for a solution, before I raise a case, so to be asked these questions is tedious. 

They email you when you have explicitly asked them to call you on the phone.

They call and email outside your normal working hours even when you have repeatedly told them what those are.  

If the person assigned goes off sick, no-one else bothers to pick up the call in their absence - great for time urgent critical issues - NOT.

They have no power to escalate any issues to get anything fixed, be it simple documentation correction or getting an identified issue fixed by a developer.

Cases drag on for months and then just get shut by them when they get bored without resolution or telling the customer.

I wish I did not have to write this, I have tried so hard to get the message across, but it is just not working, You have too many feedback mechanisms and none of them result in anything getting fixed,  in product feedback, uservoice, office insider forum, github documentation comments and different office 365 support teams.  I have been let down by every single one of these methods in the past 12 months and have the apology emails to prove it.

But ultimately this is causing me to let my customers down, because I cannot get their issues fixed in a timely manner and both I and them are losing faith in Microsoft Office as a credible solution.

I will give an example of the latest debacle:- some elements are abbreviated for the sake of time

one of my customer found suddenly that 80% of their incoming and outgoing genuine emails were being tagged as junk. We tried using the inbuilt "report this as not spam" tool, nothing changed and they started to lose business because the order confirmations were hitting their customers junk folders. This was affecting ALL of their users in the company.

Before raising a case I did full troubleshooting myself, I checked that their anti spam settings were on the standard defaults,  I used the Microsoft test console to check the message-id's of the submitted samples - which said that NO RULES had been hit, - yet it was still tagged as spam by Microsoft's filters.  I even worked out by painstakingly modifying the contents of an affected email and repeatedly sending it in to the customer until it no longer went to their junk, was that it was related to all emails that contained their own domain in the message body!!!   e.g. when you reply to someone it usually contains text that shows the original senders email like "fred@xyzcorp.com wrote:  "

So having narrowed it right down, I opened a ticket and asked to be contacted by phone - first agent decides to send me an email instead and ask dumb questions that were already answered in the case when I logged it. A terrible start to the call, After a frustrated email reply from me asking them to actually call me like I had asked for in the first place, someone else did pick up the case and called me.

I was asked for more screenshots, message id's headers etc, wasting 2 days and then that agent wrote to me by email and those responses got overlooked by me because they went to my junk mail (and I work in a different tenant but probably caused because they contained the text of the affected domain in them). Why didn't she call me instead if she was not getting a reply from me ? The lady kept asking me for all sort of other information - when all you needed was the message ID's and to escalate the issue! The lady kept apologising and saying that there was nothing she could do to get the issue looked at any quicker. I then heard nothing for 2 days and eventually someone else took over the call meanwhile we are on day 5 of a critical issue and no further forward.

Then 2 days on from that, after he said he had no further update and had not heard anything back from the relevant team, I noticed it had magically started working again.   It turns out that the team responsible for the spam system had made a change and not bothered to tell him or me!  I then asked him to try and find out a root cause analysis and was told that you do not do that sort of thing, I pressed him again and asked him to go back to that team and at least ask them when and what they had changed  this took a further 4 days and all I got back was a vague "they whitelisted the customers domain the previous night" but had not informed the agent on the case.

• How is it that a customers own domain can suddenly get tagged as spam  - without this being shown in any of your test tools? (by the way before you ask, they do not send bulk marketing emails out).
• Why did several dozen emails being reported using the "this is not junk" tool not result in this problem being picked up automatically? surely that is the point of that feedback tool?
• Why did a simple yet critical issue take so many days to get escalated to the relevant team? and then 2 days after that to be actioned ?
• Why did I have to jump through so many unnecessary hoops? when all you needed to do was supply the affected message ID's and the extra info that I had already worked out to the team that manage the rules engine?
• why did the rules team not communicate the fix they had applied back to the support agent ?
• why do you not do a root cause analysis to prevent this happening to another customer?
• Why did the first agent that took my case, decide to ignore the specified contact method of phone for an urgent case and send an email with canned cut and paste dumb questions already answered by reading the information supplied in the case?

Well there you go, rant over, but this is just one of the many calls that have been handled poorly this year.

[#14]

Hi @technonath ,

I'm sad you made that experiences (too).

From my end, I have to say that the Office 365 Support has stabilized for the moment. Call back ist still not perfect, but at least I do not have to wait for days or weeks. I also get connected via email even when I explicitly gave phone number and local time frame for a call, and only for a call. In those emails they sometimes claim that they did not reach me by phone, but my phone-log does not show any missed attempt (I am the pbx manager too, so I should know). Yes, there are individualy who do not like to call a customer, but work in first line L1 support...

I recently did not have extremely painful issues, but rather annoyances I could not solve myself. Mostly due to the frequent changes in Office 365.

Your issue with the own domain being junklisted ist interesting. I think I had a similar issue, but I was able to workaround it by adding spezial rules and exceptions. Yet, just a workaround.. Which reminds me that I probably should remove that workaround again...

About the support quality, I think Microsoft should provide separate support access points for Microsoft Partners (we are a partner...) and experienced admin's, and standard requests from Office 365 users. 

Opening a ticket as partner (or experienced admin), Office 365 support should assume that certain knowledge is available and certain pre-tests have been done. 

I usually try to determine the knowledge of the person I get on the phone and act accordingly.  Sometimes they are very advanced and are "bound" by some kind of script. Sometimes they actually go the extra mile. Most of the time though, they follow some procedure. The external 3rd-party support people are likely of the last kind. 

You *can* get the advanced ones to understand fast. Sometimes.

The others.. well... I switch to stupid and just move the mouse where they point me to. Until I eventually loose patience, open the PowerShell window with the Office 365 connection and the Problem eventually visible, and thus show them that they might want to reconsider their approach. 

All very time consuming, though.. so, I feel with you.

I *do* understand when support people sometimes re-ask questions. I worked for many many years in another big company in support. What a fellow support engineer is writing down in the ticket, what the customer wrote down, what I read and understand... not always matches. 

So one of the first question I ask when they contact me is if they have read and understood what I wrote. Sometimes I "test" them by asking something specific about what I delivered. I know, this sounds, well.. perhaps arrogant.. but it helps me determine with what kind of support person I am talking to (new, experienced, old hat, ignorant, you name it.)

People/Organisations act as they are measured/paid. I am not sure how Office 365 support is setup in detail, but I would assume that Microsoft has outsourced L1 support at least in some regions to local 3rd party (I *do* ask each supporter I have on the phone, but not all of them seem comfortable telling me that they do not work for Microsoft). So, if it's a 3rd party, they need to make money. Either they are paid by ticket they close or by other means. For example, they might be hesitant to escalate to L2 (because that might be Microsoft) and thus they would not get the full fee for a ticket that has not been closed by themselves.

At the end, customer needs to be happy. The feedback after a ticket is important.

In my past experience in support, we actively only analyzed feedback that was extreme (positive and negative) AND had a remark attached. This is what I do.

So, if you might want to give feedback to a ticket, do it in the extreme. And write a comment, be direct and ask to be contacted. Medium feedback and such without comment, disappear in statistics.

Ah, and the support engineer is sometimes the poor one in between. In my comments, I explicitly point out if I had a problem with the person, the process, the product..

Dan

[#15]

Yet another ticket where I wait and wait and wait...
Sigh...

[#16]

FWIW, i have recently been getting call backs within an hour.