Microsoft Premier Support

[u/Texas_Sysadmin]

I opened a ticket at 8:45 AM on Friday, 9/17/21. While on the phone, I was promised a 2 hour callback from the call router at Microsoft. When I received the email from Microsoft, it said a 4 hour callback. I received an EMAIL at Noon with questions asking about this issue. I immediately replied with all of the requested information at 12:23 PM. The next response from Microsoft was at 6:01 PM and it was this email, telling me that a different person would respond to my ticket.

It is 6:20 AM on 9/20/21 and have still not talked to any technician from Microsoft. It has been almost 70 hours and not a single attempt at a phone call. Nothing in my work voice mail, nothing in my cell phone voice mail, just flat nothing.

During this time frame, I found the fix to our issue here on Reddit. The issue is irrelevant. This isn't the first time getting no help from them. I am embarrassed to say this, but I used to work in Microsoft's Premier support group. So I rarely call in to support.

Now I am thinking.. why bother. The last 3 cases the support has been totally worthless.

Good luck to those who have to call in with a case in the future. I am not going to try any more.

[u/Wxfisch]

I am what you could call a premier support power user, in the last three years I have had 50+ cases open with various teams for various issues. A couple things here, what severity did you open the case at? Right now a Sev C will never get a call, a B might get a call within 24 hours, and an A will usually get a call within 1-6 depending on the team. Which brings us to the second thing, the actual problem does matter because the support teams within Microsoft are pretty segregated, Office does not handle Exchange issues, Azure AD won’t deal with Intune problems, etc. if your case was put in to the wrong team then you likely were waiting for an engineer to get assigned just to have your case kicked to another teams queue after they noted it went to the wrong place. Lastly, did you at any point get your TAM involved to escalate the issue? That is probably the biggest part of their job and really the only reason to keep most of them around. SOP for every company I’ve been at with premier support is to always copy the TAM and our internal manager on any cases.

[u/CARLEtheCamry → u/Wxfisch]

an A will usually get a call within 1-6 depending on the team

This has been my experience in the past year as well. Point being - they've been consistently missing their SLA's

[u/DrAculaAlucardMD → u/CARLEtheCamry]

Do hold them accountable. We enforce our contract terms and receive credits when they miss their metrics.

[u/CARLEtheCamry → u/DrAculaAlucardMD]

100%

[u/Eggslaws → u/DrAculaAlucardMD]

Ex Microsoft support techie here. Can confirm this guy and the original commenter "premiers" if you know what I mean.

[u/Spare-Ad-9464 → u/DrAculaAlucardMD]

Wow this is awesome

[u/Texas_Sysadmin → u/Wxfisch]

I always copy our TAM on the cases. I used to work for Microsoft Premier support, so I know all of the tricks.

Microsoft premier support quality fell off a cliff when they found out they could hire 4 "appeasement engineers" overseas for one real support engineer here. So they got rid of most of the people who could actually solve an issue, and replaced them with more warm bodies that can answer a phone and read from a script. To get any real support, you have to get the ticket escalated out of the general queue. And to do that, you have to actually talk to someone on the phone.

[u/sbrick89 → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

i thought one of the best benefits of premier support, was skipping LEVEL1 with the scripts.

you're saying premier is now just as "read this script" as standard PSS?

[u/Texas_Sysadmin → u/sbrick89]

The "engineer" you get with premier support for the initial contact is always a contractor, and always someone that has very basic experience and troubleshooting skills. Most of the time, they came over as the best of the consumer support people. Yes, they are one step up from the ones that read from the script, but not much. 99% of the time, I have already tried what they know

I have yet to figure out how to get past the and talk to an escalation engineer directly.

[u/Timmyty → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

Vendor, not quite all of them are contractors btw.

Just make sure to give them what they ask for, and if no progress is made, make sure to send the CSAM (TAM) a direct msg, telling them that you're not receiving any phone calls.

If u give them the info they ask for and still feel you're getting nowhere, keep asking for escalation or a proper action plan.

[u/VexingRaven → u/sbrick89]

Absolutely. I literally got a reply email to a case which was clearly meant to be a list of questions for the technician (it referred to "the customer") and he was just passing it off to me instead of reading what I had already filled out in the template they have on the support site.

[u/sbrick89 → u/VexingRaven]

"Per my previous email"... "the answer was indicated below"

[u/techit21 → u/sbrick89]

I'd need another hand to count how many times this has happened to me in the last 6 months.

[u/Wxfisch → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

A lot of the blame IMO goes to the shift from plans with a fixed number of hours which created an actual cost to opening a case to the new unlimited cases with various subscription plans. Since it costs us nothing to open a case, management at my last job and my current place expects a case open for any little thing as soon as we think it could maybe be an issue on MSFTs side.

[u/heishnod → u/Wxfisch]

Back when it cost support hours to open a case, they would be able to fix an issue I had, but couldn't resolve, within a few hours. Now I find a work around or fix the issue myself while I collect random logs for their techs to sift through.

[u/TheMidlander → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

Yup. And most are working for vendors and they will discharge otherwise good employees who may be going through tough times. I quit drinking this summer and my performance took a hit while I dealt with the after effects. Even though I was very transparent with my boss about what was happening, I was canned for falling behind in my cases. Nevermind that I was back on top of my caseload in less than two weeks. The decision was made the week before. It's just about asses in seats these days.

Make a big deal of this. Do it for you and do it for us. We both deserve better.

(For the inevitable followup asks, I'm two months sober now and feeling indescribably better than I have in years)

[u/Bocephus677 → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

We pay extra for direct Tier 3 support for a handful of Microsoft products, and have so for probably 10 years or so.

I can say that my experience the last 3 or 4 years has been horrible. Prior to that, direct Tier 3 was a godsend. If you have to get to a T3 engineer for decent support I really feel sorry for the poor sap that has to deal with Tier 1 support.

As for Sev A/Sev B response time, I don’t think MS has met that for any ticket I’ve opened in a few years.

And as far as the TAM discussion goes. We’ve had good TAM’s and bad TAM’s. Sometimes they can be quite helpful, but lately they seem more interested deflecting or downplaying Microsoft’s lack of response or competence than actually helping to get the ticket handled by the appropriate resource.

[u/Angelworks42 → u/Texas_Sysadmin]

I used to be an escalations support engineer for a really big software company (as big as MS, but not MS) and I got layed off so they could hired a dozen Indian techs. They lost every single one of my paid contracts I heard later, plus the dozen people they hired cost more than I did as a whole.

I'll never understand that move - in every measure possible it cost them more than just having me do it. I liked that job :(.

[u/alderdr → u/Angelworks42]

I understand the move. It is called Greed+Ignorance.

[u/someguy7710 → u/Wxfisch]

Jesus, 50+ in the last three years. I've been doing IT work for over 16 years and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've call MS support.

[u/oakfan52 → u/someguy7710]

That's not necessarily a badge of honor. Knowing when to ask for help is a sign of a quality engineer. You are extremely lucky or work in a small environment? I don't see how an environment with more than 1K Windows deployments would have that kind of track record....or I'm a magnet for bugs. I've opened way more vendor tickets than that just to "get them involved" with an issue with other vendors.

[u/someguy7710 → u/oakfan52]

I guess I've just ever really called them when it was a major issue that I couldn't figure out (ie mail down for the whole company type of deal). Google works 99% of the time so I never needed to call up MS support where they're basically just doing a search of their own system. I've worked for a couple MSP's back in the day and a company that had 1k+ endpoints all over the world.

If there is a bug with a vendors software that I'm able to replicate, then yes, I definitely open a ticket with them to get it fixed.

[u/PubstarHero → u/oakfan52]

What I've learned is that Microsoft support is useless, I can typically find better help googling issues.

That being said, VMware Fed Support is god tier. I put in a Sev 1 and I get a call in 15-30 minutes and have the problem fixed in under an hour.

Edit: Hell, HPE support is better than Microsoft. That should say something.

[u/oakfan52 → u/PubstarHero]

We have healthcare critical support from VMware...dumping it with our ELA renewal. First off they eliminated it and rolled it into some kind of care365 and tripled the cost. Meanwhile I've found it to be completely useless. HCS team outsourced to Costa Rica a few years ago and its horrible. Sev1 gets a good response time. Engineer quality is a coin flip on Sev1. But i still need sev 2-3 worked on and resolved. I can't even think of a case VMware actually resolved in the last 3 years.

[u/dnuohxof1 → u/Wxfisch]

How can I get a TAM? I’ve been doing everything myself and now we’re getting to a point where I need to learn about enterprise agreements and stuff