How Does the US Cloud Ticket Escalation Process Work?.

Every business will submit a ticket to their Microsoft Support service at some point, but whether it gets a prompt response or not is another matter entirely.

Many companies that use Microsoft Unified Support complain that the ticket response times take longer than usual, with average response times ranging from a few hours to a few days at best. Conversely, US Cloud focuses on reducing the time it takes to address a ticket, moving it up the chain of experience if it requires specialized assistance to resolve, and backing all of this up with guaranteed SLAs.

Microsoft Unified Support tickets are broken down into tiers of severity, ranging from 1 to 4, with response times for tickets dependent on the severity and the support package that your company uses.

For those with Microsoft Unified Core and Advanced, you get 1-hour responses for critical severity tickets and 8 hours for standard severity tickets. Microsoft Unified Performance, which is supposed to be the most expensive and most responsive support option, averages 1.2-hour responses for critical tickets and 4 hours for standard tickets, making the upgrade virtually worthless from a statistical view.

These are all based on averages and initial response times. Ticket resolution times can range anywhere from a few hours to days or weeks depending on how high priority the ticket is to your company. If it heavily impacts certain processes, it has a higher chance of being resolved quicker. Expect delays on any ticket you submit, no matter the severity. Microsoft engineers are stretched thin, with many being overseas, third-party engineers. If this sounds unreasonable, you aren’t alone in feeling that way. That’s why US Cloud created a ticket process that takes your concerns seriously.

The US Cloud Unified ticket process is based on ticket severity.

Using financially backed SLAs, we guarantee that any ticket submitted through the Account Portal or by phone will have an initial response time (IRT) of 15 minutes or less for tickets of all severities. The responding US Cloud engineer will review the details and severity level indicated by the client to determine how much of an impact the problem has on your business and what priority it should take. Then they will work the ticket personally or route it to the correct resources.

Ticket severity is broken down into four tiers, as shown below:

• Severity 1 | Catastrophic business impact
  Complete loss of one or more primary systems or services and core business processes / business-critical work cannot reasonably continue. Production, operations or deployment deadlines are severely affected, or there will be a severe impact on production or profitability. Multiple users are affected.
• Severity 2 | Critical business impact
  Significant loss or degradation of services with business-critical work severely affected, but not completely halted. Primary services are usable but in a significantly impaired fashion. The situation has high business impact and is detrimental to productivity and/or some critical functions, although immediate damage to business outcomes is moderate or temporary.
• Severity 3 | Moderate business impact
  Moderate degradation or loss of services, but work can continue in a sub-optimal manner. The issue is important but does not have a significant current service or productivity impact for the customer.
• Severity 4 | Minimal business impact
  Systems functioning with minor or no impediments. The situation has limited or no direct business impact. The issue needs to be addressed as an inconvenience, but users can temporarily manage with a low-impact work-around.

Any tickets that are marked as severity 1 or 2 gain automatic priority routing to a CritSit Manager for confirmation of severity assessment and immediate action.

Since these are the most impactful on your bottom line, we get an appropriate Sr. Unified Engineer to engage and work the ticket within 30 minutes of initial response, no matter what time or day.

These tickets will also trigger an alert to your TAM and Engineering Leadership, which pulls them into the process on an as-needed basis. Severity 1 tickets will be worked continuously until resolved, with status updates to you every 3 hours, at minimum. Severity 2 tickets will be worked as an expedited issue and prioritized over any severity 3 or 4 tickets in the US Cloud ticket queue until resolved.

If there are any severity 1 or 2 tickets that require tenant access or can’t be solved without Microsoft involvement, we will escalate them through our Microsoft Unified Support for Partner paths immediately.

Any severity 3 or 4 tickets that have similar requirements will be escalated through our Microsoft Unified Support for Partners path for cloud products or Microsoft Incidents for on-premises products.

If any ticket of any severity is determined by US Cloud to require Microsoft for resolution, it will be escalated on behalf of the customer immediately. If 24 hours have passed without resolution on a severity 1 ticket or 48 hours for a severity 2 ticket, you can have US Cloud escalate the ticket to Microsoft.

If a ticket is determined by our team to require a higher level of experience on a particular Microsoft technology or issue after going through our internal escalation process, we will first escalate to a Microsoft Partner in our Elite Microsoft Partner Network. On average, less than 20% of all tickets submitted require escalation and resolution by partners, with half of those issues being escalated to Microsoft.

US Cloud ensures that your tickets are handled promptly by the most experienced engineers in the industry. Our engineers have an average of 16 years of Microsoft service experience and are all US-based, giving you rapid support you can trust. Our financially backed SLAs also give you the peace of mind that any ticket you submit will be answered as fast as possible. All of this, with the addition of saving 30-50% on your Microsoft Unified Support spend. For faster Microsoft support for less, nobody does it better than US Cloud.