Update: The rollout of these enhancements for Premier and Unified Support customers is expected to reach completion in August 2018. Once this rollout has completed, if you attempt to open a support ticket outside of the Office 365 Admin Center, you will be redirected to the Office 365 Admin Center to open that support request. 

 

 

As an Office 365 customer, it’s important that you have reliable support from Microsoft that is flexible to your needs so that you can focus on your business. In September, we launched a new support experience for Office 365 customers to provide this service. After hearing initial customer feedback, we’re rolling out improvements to the support experience in admin center for all customers and to extend the enhanced experience to Premier customers as well. For Premier customers, we also understand the importance of being routed to Microsoft’s Premier-specific engineers for the most critical issues and have added features to deliver Premier tickets to the correct teams right away.

 

The new support experience will begin rolling out to Premier customers in the beginning of April and will be available to all Premier customers by July. Other non-Premier specific improvements made to the overall support experience are currently rolling out to all customers.

 

The updated support experience includes the following improvements:

 

Quick access to support – With Office 365 admin credentials, customers can quickly open a support ticket with Microsoft by accessing ‘New service request’ under ‘Support’ on the left side panel or simply clicking ‘Need help’ at the bottom right of the admin center. Both options will open an in-product fly-out to create your ticket.

 

 

Intelligent self-help solutions –  We understand that some support issues can be resolved quickly with the right self-help solutions. The new support experience uses machine learning to classify the information you enter about your issue and surfaces any relevant information that may help you easily resolve the issue yourself, from current advisories in the Service Health Dashboard to specific solutions pulled from applicable support sources.

 

Flexible support tailored to you – If you want to request support from Microsoft directly, you can easily do so in a way that makes most sense to you, as different issues may require different types of support. In the ‘Let us call you’ tab, you can add relevant attachments and notes to your support ticket and we’ll get in touch over the phone as soon as possible at a time that is convenient for you.

 

Based on customer feedback, we’ve also added the option to receive support via email. Under ‘Email us’ you can opt to be contacted via email to communicate and receive support from Microsoft.

 

While the experience currently supports attachments up to 5MB, we have heard your feedback that bigger file size is needed for more efficient support. We are currently working to bring you larger attachments for support tickets soon. 

 

Comprehensive view of ticket statuses and history – Once the ticket has been submitted, you will be able to view the status and history of all tickets, with the most recent tickets at the top of the list. Customers can quickly see the status of each ticket and click each one to see specific details of service.

 

  

Once tickets have been submitted, you can provide additional information by submitting notes or updating attachments. However, ticket details such as description of issue, email address, and person of contact for the ticket cannot be altered.

 

Specialized support for Premier customers – As a Premier customer, you expect more focused support for your most critical issues. We recognize this need in the Premier community and have added the ability to indicate an issue as Critical, directly in-product as you create the ticket. Critical designation allows Microsoft to provide the most efficient support that is focused on your issue. When you indicate a ticket as Critical, we will route the ticket to a Critical Situation management team that will manage your incident communications from beginning to end as it is being resolved by Premier engineers. 

 

 

Let us know what you think! 

Your feedback is crucial to improving the Office 365 experience. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make Office 365 support meet your needs for better productivity. Provide feedback on the updated support experience using the feedback link in the lower right corner of the admin center or give us feedback on an individual ticket experience when you’re prompted after the ticket has been resolved.