When working directly with Microsoft, these would be escalation tickets, or tickets that can’t be solved by conventional support engineers and require an engineer or team with a deeper skillset and understanding of the issue. However, working directly with Microsoft means you’re paying their dictated Unified Support price, which is continuing to rise each year. But what third-party entity is capable of ticket escalation?
However, that does mean that we must escalate tickets at times. Microsoft would have you think that when you use US Cloud for support that you suddenly lose the ability to escalate tickets to Microsoft Support teams. In fact, they recently said as much in a third-party marketing piece that was less than truthful about third-party capabilities.
With US Cloud, you don’t lose that escalation pathway to Microsoft Support teams. We handle the escalation process ourselves through some of the fastest escalation partners available to any enterprise in the world. Our engineers are also equipped to handle incident severities 1-4 and all engineering support levels 1-4. Our MSP Elite Network resolves an average of 20% of escalation tickets per month that need to move up the chain due to cloud tenant or code related issues that can only be handled by very specific professionals.
Since Gartner named US Cloud as the only viable independent third-party Microsoft support provider in 2020, they have spoken to a wide variety of US Cloud customers and can attest to our ability to escalate support tickets to Microsoft as needed.
The ability to escalate issues to Microsoft is vital to US Cloud enterprise customers. Because this is so important, US Cloud offers an Escalation Service Level Agreement (SLA) in its Master Service Agreement (MSA). The Escalation SLA gives US Cloud client assurance that unresolved tickets will time out within a certain timeframe based on technology, severity, and complexity, and be automatically escalated to Microsoft. The Initial Response Time (IRT) and Escalation SLAs are the central pillars of the US Cloud ticket process. Both SLAs are financially backed and unique to US Cloud. You won’t find another third-party that offers something even close.
We can escalate on a case-by-case basis and as needed, and there is no direct interaction with Microsoft necessary since everything is handled on our end. If putting up with Microsoft support was a headache you never want to experience again, but you still need a consistent support option, US Cloud has you covered. Not only can we escalate, but we can save you 30-50% on your Microsoft Support spend in your first year. Less time dealing with Microsoft and less time wasted on tickets sounds like a winning deal to us, but we’ll let you be the judge of that.