How US Cloud’s Microsoft Enterprise Support Works

US Cloud had twenty years of Microsoft experience as a Gold Partner and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) serving large enterprises before making the decision to phase out our data centers and invest heavily in our enterprise support services. We leveraged our enterprise experience in 24/7 mission-critical support, SaaS, Cloud infrastructure, and security to build the best infrastructure and Microsoft support team on the planet.

We are Microsoft enterprise support specialists. Others may offer support as an add-on product, but US Cloud is 100% focused on replacing Microsoft Premier and Unified Support for our clients. We were the first dedicated independent third-party to tackle this challenge and all of our staff, infrastructure, processes, technology, and knowledge are squarely aimed at providing fanatical Microsoft support for less.

Unlike the ‘all you can eat’ requirement of Microsoft Unified Support, US Cloud lets you buy only the number of support hours you need. Modeled after Microsoft Premier Support, these hours are held in a bank that you can manage and track any time in your US Cloud Client Portal.

We also did away with penalties for “topping off” hours mid-contract. If you need to add hours to your bank, you can buy up to 50% of your original purchase as the same locked rate. This lets clients come into the new service with conservative usage estimates, without the risk of overpaying if more support is needed.

All 24/7 reactive support comes with a 15 minute guaranteed response time. US Cloud break-fix support covers all Microsoft enterprise technologies and is backstopped by the industry’s only SLAs for response time and ticket escalation. Global reactive or break-fix support is a given, but support hours purchased from US Cloud can also be used for proactive support with no additional charge.

US Cloud has a full Proactive Support Catalog for things like system health-checks, readiness assessments, project advisory support, training and workshops, deployment or migration assistance, and many more. And unlike Microsoft, we don’t slap a mandatory 30% upcharge for “TAM time” on proactive projects.

One of our most frequently asked questions is “How can you escalate tickets to Microsoft if you are a competitor?” Rest assured, we can. US Cloud escalates critical high-severity cases as well as low-severity tickets to Microsoft every day. We also have specific, contractual SLA’s that govern when and how tickets are escalated to Microsoft (for bug fixes, tenant access, edge-cases, etc.).

In 2023, we have decreased total escalation tickets to just 12% going to Microsoft and 1% going to our specialist MSFT partners. In other words, a full 87% of break-fix tickets are solved in house, delivering faster and more cost-efficient results. If you’d like to know how we do it exactly, we would be happy to walk you through our Managed Microsoft Escalation process in detail.

As Microsoft continues to swap its Technical Account Managers (TAM’s) for lower-level Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s), US Cloud is going the other direction. All our clients get a TAM dedicated to their account, benefit from a specialized onboarding team and process, and have access to Designated Support Engineers (DSE’s) for all Microsoft technologies.

By maintaining a long-term relationship with their clients a TAM gains an understanding of their enterprise’s IT organization, impact on overall business, their IT goals, and their pain points – which is used by the TAM to create and manage a Service Delivery Plan ensuring their enterprise operational success with Microsoft products.

DSE’s go well beyond break-fix and enhance your enterprise’s capacity to accelerate planning and completion of large-scale projects. By embedding these key strategic resources into your team, US Cloud provides you with subject matter experts who develop a deep understanding of your unique IT environment and can dramatically optimize your Microsoft enterprise software investment, saving you both time and money.