Outlining US Cloud’s Microsoft Support Escalation SLA.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren’t something that everyone provides, because not everyone can back up their services.

US Cloud isn’t like everyone else, which is why our SLA is the first in the industry. We also guarantee that your support tickets are handled promptly and automatically escalated if the severity is great enough. Frustration over ignored tickets and delayed escalation ends with US Cloud.

US Cloud is a company of firsts, especially around SLAs. We are the only third-party Microsoft support provider that offers an SLA for our enterprise customers, giving us an edge over other third-party options and Microsoft. In 2018, we were the first to offer an Initial Response Time (IRT) SLA of 15 minutes or less for Microsoft tickets of all severities, something nearly unheard of in the industry.

Then in 2021, we became the first to offer a time-bound, automated escalation process for all ticket severities with an SLA to back it up. The US Cloud Escalation SLA is financially backed, just like the IRT, and is a standard across our Premier/Unified Support service agreements. The escalation process states that if any severity 1 or 2 ticket comes through, it is handled by a senior engineer immediately, with status updates to the client every 3 hours. If any of these tickets require tenant access or can’t be solved without Microsoft involvement, they will be escalated to Microsoft through our third-party partners program right away.

While US Cloud offers financially backed SLAs for our clients across the board, Microsoft Premier and Unified offer nothing for clients. Instead, all response times and escalations are considered targets with no financial penalties for service delivery failures. This means that they have response goal times but aren’t financially obligated to meet those targets. Many clients find that their tickets will sit weeks or months until finally addressed or, if the need is great enough, they demand that their Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM) escalates their ticket. In many cases, to avoid the wait, clients will even submit tickets at the highest priority to try and get an answer faster.

The IT inefficiencies this causes is further exacerbated by Microsoft’s shift away from the Technical Account Manager (TAM) role. They instead are replacing this role with the less expensive and less technical CSAMs. Should an enterprise IT staff member submit a ticket, they find themselves watching the ticket languish in limbo. If they get on the phone with a CSAM, they have to explain a technical issue to an individual who, although empathetic to the plight of their customer, doesn’t have the technical knowledge to immediately understand the issue or importance of the problem. This leaves some companies withering in the wind, waiting for the ticket to be escalated and an experienced engineer to give it a look.

One of the biggest frustrations for a client is to submit a ticket and have it sit, especially if it’s considered lower severity. Just because a ticket is low severity doesn’t mean it’s not important. Many low severity tickets are a nuisance that can lead to greater problems or frustrations if not dealt with promptly. At Microsoft, it isn’t unusual to have a ticket sit open for weeks or months without resolution if the severity is a 3 or 4. As part of US Cloud’s onboarding process, we triage open Premier/Unified tickets. While severity 1 and 2 tickets are addressed first, we commit scheduled time to handling low severity tickets so we don’t end up with a backlog.

US Cloud’s escalation SLA assures all clients that any open, high severity tickets will be handled systematically and resolved rapidly. Due to this financially backed SLA, many companies have chosen to replace Microsoft Premier/Unified Support with US Cloud.

The status of tickets is an issue that many Microsoft clients are dealing with daily. With US Cloud’s Microsoft Enterprise Support Escalation SLA, the status of a ticket is automatically updated as it is escalated, while our Support Portal updates in real time and alerts all relevant Points of Contact (POC) about the status change.

Speaking of Support Portal, we’ve worked hard to create a ticket portal that holds all the most important Microsoft Enterprise Support information and assistance. While you can open support tickets and check the status of them in real time, you can also use Power BI reporting on your enterprise’s trends to service your reporting needs.

The US Cloud Microsoft Enterprise Support ticket portal is the best place to check IRT and Escalation SLA performance. If you don’t have time to look over the portal, your TAM will review your dashboard during your Quarterly Business Review (QBR) and before your renewal, so you get the most out of your investment. You’re paying for a service, so you should be getting the most out of it. US Cloud ensures that no matter what, you have a clear understanding of where tickets sit, if your investment is paying off, and how your services will be taken care of in the future.