Dispel the Myths of Support Ticket Escalations to Microsoft.

Understand how US Cloud escalates support tickets to Microsoft. See the data for your expected aggregate efficiency gains and cost savings.

Microsoft Premier/Unified support customers can escalate tickets to Microsoft as needed. US Cloud support escalates only 20% of its tickets, with 80% resolved faster and cheaper than Microsoft. See below for how the US Cloud “extra step” impacts aggregate operational efficiency and cost savings for enterprises.

Enterprise help desk tiers 1-3 typically need to escalate an issue to Microsoft once the internal IT team resources or capabilities have been exhausted.

Once internal help desk escalation reaches  tier 4 help desk support it is escalated to the OEM vendor. Or the issue may be immediately identified as beyond their control, such as a cloud tenant issue in a Microsoft data center or a bug or vulnerability in Microsoft software.

Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) help desks have a strict and required troubleshooting methodology before they may escalate an issue to Microsoft.  Otherwise the ticket may be returned and the CSP may receive an adverse score on supporting its customers appropriately.

Per Microsoft, CSPs are required to:

• Receive incoming support requests from customers.
• Diagnose issues to the best of your ability.
• Resolve issues within scope of the baseline support boundaries.

Per Microsoft, to fulfill their customer support requirement, they can:

• Resell support from another company.
• Outsource all or part of the support structure.
• Set up a structure to provide support directly.

CSP help desk troubleshooting steps:

1) Check service health for Microsoft service outages
2) Use your admin privileges to troubleshoot the software, settings, and configuration.

However, there are several categories of issues that CSPs need to escalate to Microsoft to fix:

• Undocumented problems with services that aren’t operating according to service descriptions.
• Unavailable services
• Bugs and other irregularities that affect service appearance or operation
• Large-scale network disruptions
• Regional issues with multi-tenant impact

For those who still have Microsoft Premier Support, it is recommended that all Microsoft technology support issues follow your normal internal help desk resolution and tier 1-3 escalation process.

Doing so avoids wasting pre-paid Premier Support hours. If escalation to Microsoft is needed, login to the Microsoft Services Hub and follow the prompts to open a support request. For critical (severity A) issues you must call Microsoft at 800-936-3100.

For enterprises subscribed to Microsoft Unified support, it is recommended that you escalate all severity tickets immediately since you are paying for support “as needed.”

This allows you to get maximum ROI from Unified while increasing operational efficiency of your internal help desk as they can focus on non-Microsoft related issues. If escalation to Microsoft is needed, login to the Microsoft Services Hub and follow the prompts to open a support request. For critical (severity A) issues you must call Microsoft at 800-936-3100.

For those enterprises who have US Cloud Support, it is recommended that all Microsoft technology support issues follow your normal internal help desk resolution and tier 1-3 escalation process.

Doing so avoids wasting pre-paid US Cloud Support hours. If escalation to US Cloud is needed, login to the Customer Portal and follow the prompts to open a support ticket. All severity issue tickets will receive a response within 15 minutes.

20% of the time US Cloud Support adds an extra step to tickets that need to be escalated to Microsoft for issues such as tenant, code bugs, service outages, or reporting discovered vulnerabilities.

US Cloud is 15% slower than Microsoft managing all escalated tickets on behalf of the client so they can continue to focus on their business.

80% of the time US Cloud support does not add an extra step to support ticket resolution.  You open a ticket and US Cloud fixes the issue faster than Microsoft Premier/Unified. On average over 12 months, across all Microsoft technologies and all support ticket severities, US Cloud is 35% faster than Microsoft resulting in significant aggregate operational efficiency gains for our clients.

Let’s look at a typical business client’s time savings over the course of a year.

80% of the time US Cloud support does not add an extra step to support ticket resolution.

20% of the time US Cloud Support adds an extra step to tickets that need to be escalated to Microsoft for issues such as tenant, code bugs, service outages, or reporting discovered vulnerabilities. US Cloud is 15% slower than Microsoft managing all these escalated tickets on behalf of the client so they can continue to focus on their business.

80% of the time US Cloud support does not add an extra step to support ticket resolution.  You open a ticket and US Cloud fixes the issue faster than Microsoft Premier/Unified. On average over 12 months, across all Microsoft technologies and all support ticket severities, US Cloud is 35% faster than Microsoft resulting in significant aggregate operational efficiency gains for our clients.

In addition, we guarantee that our support rate is at least 30% lower than Microsoft. Between hours saved in efficiency and our lower support rate, US Cloud clients save big, while getting faster support.

Let’s look at a typical enterprise client’s cost savings over the course of a year.