Quality of Office 365 support is sinking..

RussellRead 

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.